Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman is a deeply disturbing book. This scenario that unfolds around the life of its principal character and narrator, Harrison Opoku, always feels uncomfortably real. For the most part, these are scenes that inner-city dwellers pass every day, whilst the denouement, thankfully, is still rare, despite such events often appearing to be daily occurrences.

Harrison Opoku is eleven years old, secondary school year seven to British readers. He is into many things that interest inner-city kids. He is athletic and regularly tells us he is fast he is faster than most, especially when wearing his new branded trainers, if brand logos can be drawn on in felt tip, that is. We doubt, however, whether his assessment is based on more than a competitive dash to the next lamppost along a pavement containing just a few old ladies and gentlemen.

He is prone to the exaggeration of youth, with most experiences being the best, biggest, coolest in at least a million years. He is also prone to the novelty of youth, where the mundane is revealed as special. This is one of Stephen Kelman’s great achievements, in that one feels authentically inside the psyche of this near-pubescent boy without ever being forced into the experience.

Harri is competitive, regularly awarding points to himself in make-believe games that often involve such spectacular activities as spotting particular governments going around inside a Launderette machine. He lives in a tower block in a place that feels like London but could be anywhere in Britain. One does sense an oppressiveness, a claustrophobia pervading the thoughts of all concerned. Everything is local, to the extent that the end of the street is really quite distant.

Harrison Opoku, however, was not British born. He came from Ghana and still has vivid memories of his African family and their culture. To say he is a child of two worlds, or two cultures, however, would be a mistake. Harry lives his own life, the only life he has, and it comes with whatever amalgam of beliefs and cultures he has thus far assimilated. He is a black, African kid, it is true, but labelling him as such ignores the fact that the greatest influence on his life is the here and now. And the here and now is inner-city Britain.

He goes to school, where he meets some teachers who cope and some who do not. School is a priority, but it is well down the list, it seems. His friends and acquaintances largely attend the same institution and some of them can be trusted, whilst some of them can be trusted to shaft you. Some of them steal your dinner money. Some of them sell you drugs. Some of them prick you with compass points in the thigh to make you cry out in class and get into trouble. Some of them carry knives. And use them.

In this big anonymous city, Harry inhabits quite a small world. He has a crush on Poppy, whom he thinks might also have a crush on him. He never strays far from home, because that may be someone else’s territory, a different gang, who are likely to treat you like an immigrant. And there has been a problem. A boy is dead, stabbed, and the police have taped off the crime scene. But for Harri, what has happened is close to home, perhaps too close, and he resolves to solve the crime that currently baffles the police. He devises a strategy and plays at its enactment. This involves becoming an expert in fingerprinting, in making casts of footwear imprints, of noticing and collecting evidence. Someone, surely, must be noting his activity.

Throughout Pigeon English, Harri talks to the pigeon who picks up the feed he leaves outside his window. The pigeon seems to know what Harry, himself, suspects. And thus we move between the serious and playful, fact and make-believe, with the boundaries marked by postcodes, street names and imagining lives that only those involved may see. We learn to inhabit this eleven year-old’s world, to share its novelty and understand its reality.

Investigating a murder, dodging the dealers, not stepping on the cracks in the pavement, it’s all a game. Until it isn’t.

The Umbrella Men by Keith Carter

In The Umbrella Men, Keith Carter directs various characters in a plot to act out the financial crisis of 2008. The author specifically wants to highlight the role played by RBS, Royal Bank of Scotland, in a process that might be described as financial vandalism, wrecking things by financing them, but there are plenty of other actors who also get it in the neck in the fusillade of the author’s invention.

The Umbrella Men brings fictional characters into real-life scenarios. This is, of course, the basis of most historical fiction, which often goes as far as putting invented words into once real, living mouths. Keith Carter avoids this trap. Key actors in the financial crash, such as Sir Fred Goodwin of RBS, or the members of the Middle Eastern consortium who refinanced Barclays, appear occasionally in name only, but not as protagonists. This allows the author carte blanche to invent people who can act out his scenario. And this he does, and that is precisely what they do.

The Umbrella Men is the kind of book that ought to be described as plot led, in that if the “what happened” were to be removed, there would not be a lot left. Strangely, in this case, we also know the plot before we start, if we have been even mildly conscious at any time in the last decade. So what might there be left to say? Quite a lot it seems, certainly enough to run to more than 400 pages in the electronic version.

Nothing of the book’s plot will be revealed here, except that it deals with the 2008 financial crisis. This is merely an introductory description of the scenario. Characters names will also be omitted, because long before the end, it’s merely the roles enacted by these people - there are more relevant and accurate words - that flesh out the author’s plot.

There is a London resident director and part owner of a company called Rareterre. He is married. They are living beyond their means and they have a family. The company mines, or did mine, rare earths and has been operating in Oregon. Their facility there has been dormant for a while after a drop in the prices of their products. They succumb to a financing deal from RBS to bring the mine back to life. There’s a disaffected financier from New York who ditches her boyfriend and heads for a simple new life in Oregon, of all places. She joins an environmental group and meets in indigenous American, who has been pursuing his own personal campaign against certain corporate interests in the area. Their relationship develops improbably around a mutual interest in stopping, you may have guessed, rare earth mining.

And there’s the bankers, not only RBS but predominately them, a financial speculator outfit called B&B, that is also interested in consuming main meals. There are Italian girls in gymnasia, numerous boyfriends, estranged and current, mental break ups, bogus contracts, takeovers, market crashes and, of course, the Chinese, who effectively create a takeaway, pun intended.

The Umbrella Men is structured, if that be the word, like a box set of episodes from a TV drama. Each chapter contains an author-driven polemic, followed by numerous scene and location changes, so that these characters can issue dialogue, best described as strings of clichés to illustrate and justify what we were told that the start. The book thus sounds and feels more like TV drama as it progresses. The Umbrella Men will enthral readers who adore such TV dramas.

But these people do not live, except to live out the plot, a task they accomplish quite effectively. There are a few dilemmas, almost no contradictions, and, basically, very little conflict. The pieces move around and the game is completed. By then, this reader was left wondering whether this should have been a novel at all.

And, by the way, we know that Sir Fred Goodwin will survive at the end, though he seems to have achieved a suitable anonymity by then.

All Too Human - Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life edited by Elena Crippa

All Too Human - Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life edited by Elena Crippa is a catalogue for a 2018 exhibition in London’s Tate Gallery. It's a present works by the titled painters, plus several others who comprise what the compilers describe as a London Group. A weakness in the presentation is the labelling of these artists as a Group simply by virtue of their having lived in London and largely studied at a small number of the capital’s schools. Styles here are often divergent. Paula Rego, one of the featured artists, is Portuguese but trained and for a while lived in London. Kitaj also was not British, but London seems for him to have been home.

But perhaps this divergent list of artists represents a particular strength of London, being its cosmopolitan sophistication. Lucian Freud was from an immigrant family as a result of his eminent grandfather's flight from Nazism. John Singer Sergeant was American. Francis Newton Souza, also featured throughout the book, was from Goa. Celia Paul is British, but was born in India. Chaime Soutine, elements of whose style were either adopted or at least appreciated by some of the featured artists, was Russian. Just to complicate things further, he was Jewish, trained in France, was born in what is now Belarus and influenced artists working in London. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye was born to a family of Ghanaian immigrants to Britain. David Bomberg also studied, lived and worked in London, but he was Birmingham-born to a family of Polish immigrants. Again, this is London’s strength and, indeed, its very identity. It is big, cosmopolitan and sophisticated - big in ideas as well as in size, cosmopolitan in outlook as well as by population and sophisticated enough to welcome diversity and not be threatened by people’s freedom of movement or, for that matter, freedom of expression. London is thus different from the rest of the United Kingdom. It is even different from the rest of the United Kingdom’s cities, and so the catalogue’s claim of “London Group” for these diverse artists goes beyond merely artistic considerations. It also, arguably, undermines its own intention by creating a label that is shared only because those included in its sphere are so diverse as to share, arguably, little in common.

The contributors offer insights rather than analyses. And this is a strength of the narrative, since analysis is in the eye of the viewer of these works. Their comments are often descriptive but, with the exception of Andrew Brighton’s essay, always apposite. Again, with one exception, they clarify and inform our ability to observe these works, all of which, in some way or other, concentrate on the human form. Where the body is not immediately apparent, its presence is at least implied, even essential to our interpretation of a response to these paintings.

Bacon’s tormented forms, Freud's brutally interpretive brush strokes, Yiadom-Boakye’s often frozen dancers, Kitaj’s suffering hedonists, Paul's apparently apologetic presence, Newton Sousa’s Byzantine saints, Rego’s stocky surfaces, all of these and more are presented to illustrate how we inhabit the images of our bodies through different eyes. Neither the exhibition nor its catalogue aims at anything like coherence or completeness and does not approach either. But that would miss the real point, which is that we imagine ourselves, image ourselves and represent ourselves. We do not control how others see see us or interpret what they see. But what these artists via this exhibition and catalogue do communicate without ambiguity is that there exist as many ways of seeing the world and as many ways of interpreting human presence within it as there are eyes that see it. And note: many of us also have more than one eye.

Self-promotion or self-demotion? An emotional observation.

I read quite a lot. I also try to review each book I read. Sometimes it’s a cursory mention of themes, settings and plot, just enough just to keep the memory alive. I find it helps, because with the help of these little clues I often find that some time after finishing a book I suddenly understand it better after re-reading the review and thereby appreciate more completely what it was trying to say. If, of course, the book had anything to say! 

Usually, my reviews of 500 to 1000 words, sometimes longer if I decide to include grab-quotes. I keep the reviews in a commonplace book that I started in August 1973, immediately after some of the most interesting years of my life when I was an undergraduate in London. These years are condemned to remain no more than memories, it seems, but the memories remain strong.

My reviews are rarely judgmental. I am not keen on star ratings, though some places where I share my reviews demand them. It seems to me the height of self-delusion to use a single, five-value scale to quantify eternal opinion on work that might be as diverse as a haiku or Ulysses. Equally facetious is the banal “I liked it” which, like all clichés, should be avoided like the plague.

What I try to do, sometimes, is to mimic the style of the book. This means that reviews of nineteenth century fiction are longer than those for books from the 20th century. The draft of a recent review of Middlemarch had so many subordinate clauses, asides and God‘s-eye-view observations that the first sentence reached 200 words. I remember it made the point I intended, but I ditched it.

So, with the decades of summary reviewing behind me, one would have thought that completing an author interview would be a trivial exercise. But no. I was just ten questions into the process when I realized I had spent over an hour at the task, and I had written very little indeed. The process suddenly took on an importance I had not envisaged developing when I started.

In the final analysis, the book that formed the basis of the interview, Eileen McHugh, a life remade, must speak for itself. The review is merely an aide memoire. The book must speak for itself. It will have to, because trying to express where it came from was a disturbingly cathartic experience which probably only skirted clarity. The interview is online at https://www.smashwords.com/interview/philipspires.

Why did I write Eileen McHugh, a life remade?

I wanted to explore several strands, the first and most important being the interrelationship between popular and populist, understanding the latter term in its colloquial sense of wanting to achieve popularity, possibly at all costs. I have long found it intriguing why pop music, for instance, is assumed to refer to ‘popular’ music when something over ninety per cent of releases never achieve popularity on any measure. Probably more than ninety per cent of pop is also not from Tajikistan, but we do not call it Tajik music. Thus labelling things by what they are not could be an infinite process! If pop means populist, however, then it makes sense, because this art form seeks, by whatever means, to achieve public notice, sales, profit and the rest, with the stress on the words ‘aspires to achieve’, hence the failure of ninety per cent of the genre. This often leads to an artist compromising an idea to render it saleable. But if an artist does not do that, the work remains unknown, anonymous, unexperienced. How much should an artist in whatever form seek to live within the confines of recognisable genre? And is that possible without compromising what the artist wants to communicate? How far can one go along this road before reproducing cliché?

Eileen McHugh is an artist. She is a sculptor. She seeks no avenues of compromise in her work. Her career was short and unnoticed. Paradoxically, one of her works has achieved viral status on the internet via a photograph posted in the name of Mary Reynolds, who now wants to create a biography of the artist and a discussion of her work so that she can create a museum to display it. She has contacted Eileen’s mother and has the artist’s sketchbooks and notes.

Eileen wanted to tell stories in her work, stories that arose out of the detritus of people’s lives, their bits and pieces of discarded trash. Her work at one stage is described as ‘off the wall’ as well as on it. The form of the book, however, repeatedly illustrates how lives themselves mirror this state. The lives of people who knew the artist become like new works created by Eileen, assemblages of life’s discarded bits and pieces.

Another strand was the obsession that drives artistic expression, if the motivations of populism and profit do not apply. Why exactly did Schubert write over six hundred songs when he never heard a single one of them performed before a paying audience? What motivated the composer Mieczeslaw Wenberg to ‘write for the shelf’? What drove a deaf Beethoven to communicate via sound?

And why is it that we often feel challenged by art? Is it because we have no idea what we like, and prefer to live in the security of liking what we know? Is it because we only trust things with which we have an assumed commercial relationship, so therefore we trust the transactions being offered?

Paradoxically, by the end of Eileen McHugh, the artist herself is perhaps the person we know the least, despite having been the subject of the whole book! If we do not see people as assemblages of their petty likes and dislikes, any of which might change on whim, what is left? Perhaps it remains as anonymous and unknown as ignored work. Our real contribution to humanity, however, artistically or otherwise, is eventually revealed as that which we give to others. Even tragedy can have a positive outcome.

Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd purports to offer a sister volume to the highly successful London: The Biography. To a point it succeeds, but in general the feeling of pastiche dominates to such an extent that the idea of biography soon dissolves into a scrapbook. The book presents an interesting journey and many fascinating encounters. But it also regularly conveys a sense of the incomplete, sometimes that of a jumbled ragbag of associations that still needs the application of work-heat and condensation in order to produce something palatable. Thus a book that promises much eventually delivers only a partially-formed experience. Ostensibly the project makes perfect sense. London: The Biography described the life of the city, its history and its inhabitants. There was a stress on literary impressions, art and occasional social history to offer context. This was no mere chronicle and neither was it just a collection of tenuously related facts. It was a selective and, perhaps because of that, an engaging glimpse into the author’s personal relationship with this great city. Thames River flows like an essential artery through and within London’s life. Peter Ackroyd identifies the metaphor and returns to it repeatedly, casting this flow of water in the role of bringer of both life and death to the human interaction that it engenders. And the flow is inherently ambiguous, at least as far downstream as the city itself, where the Thames is a tidal estuary. At source, and for most of its meandering life, it snakes generally towards the east, its flow unidirectional. But this apparent singularity of purpose is complicated by its repeated merging with sources of quite separate character via almost uncountable tributaries, some of which have quite different, distinct, perhaps contradictory imputed personalities of their own. Thus Peter Ackroyd attempts by occasional geographical journey but largely via a series of thematic examinations to chart a character, an influence and a history that feeds, harms, threatens and often beautifies London, the metropolis that still, despite the book’s title, dominates the scene. These universal themes – bringer of life, death, nurture, disease, transcendence and reality, amongst many others – provides the author with an immense challenge. Surely this character is too vast a presence to sum up in a single character capable of biography. And, sure enough, this vast expanse of possibility is soon revealed as the book’s inherent weakness. Thus the overall concept ceases to work quite soon after the book’s source. A sense of potpourri and pastiche begins to dominate. Quotations abound, many from poets who found inspiration by this great river, but their organisation and too often their content leaves much to be desired. Ideas float past, sometimes on the tide, only to reappear a few pages on, going the other way. Sure enough they will be back again before the end. Dates come and go in similar fashion, often back and forth within a paragraph. No wonder the tidal river is murky, given that so many metaphors flow through it simultaneously. And then there are the rough edges, the apparently unfinished saw cuts that were left in the rush to get the text to press. We learn early on that water can flow uphill. Young eels come in at two inches, a length the text tells us is the same as 25mm. We have an estuary described as 250 miles square, but only 30 miles long. We have brackish water, apparently salt water mixed with fresh in either equal or unequal quantities. Even a writer as skilful as Peter Ackroyd can get stuck in mud like this. At the end, as if we had not already tired of a procession of facts only barely linked by narrative, we have an ‘Alternative Typology’ where the bits that could not be cut and pasted into the text are presented wholly uncooked – not even prepared. Thames: The Biography was something of a disappointment. It is packed with wonderful material and overall is worth the lengthy journey but, like the river itself, it goes on. The book has the feel of a work in progress. This may be no bad thing, since the river is probably much the same.

Families in Conflict - Brixton Beach by Roma Tearne

Brixton Beach by Roma Tearne presents a vast project. Its story crosses the globe, beginning in Sri Lanka and ending in Britain. Great events befall its characters, but throughout their lives seem to be writ small against a backdrop of history. The novel opens with an apt quote from Jack Kerouac – All life is a foreign country. This idea forms substantially more than a theme, in the no matter how secure the book’s characters might appear – and equally however insecure – they never really seem to be at home with themselves.

We meet the Fonsekas in Colombo. They live near the beach in this frenetic city. Alice is a nine-year-old. Her parents, Stanley and Sita are a mixed marriage, Tamil and Sinhalese. Alice’s grandparents, Bee and Kamala, are happily married in their own way. Bee is something of an artist. The grandparent show significant wisdom. But things are stirring in Sri Lanka. There is a smell of conflict, a hint or war.

A mixed marriage is hard to sustain, and its offspring don’t fit into anyone’s interests or desires. Alice grows into a rather isolated child. She has friends, but then she doesn’t. She does well at school, and then she doesn’t. She makes things, shares her grandfather’s artistic bent. Lives in paradise grow steadily more complicated, apparently less sustainable. Stanley, Alice’s father, decides that his future, and eventually his family’s, lies in Britain. He books a sea passage and an unscheduled stop-over in Greece opens his eyes to ancient cincture and provides other activities that always threatened, but until then never materialised.

In Britain he ekes out an immigrant’s lot, doing whatever he can. When Sita and Alice eventually join him, he has changed and they don’t fit in. They can’t. Perhaps no-one ever does, anywhere. Sita mourns the child she lost to her own destruction as she works from home on her sewing machine. Alice doesn’t get on at school, except with a chain-smoking art teacher. And so life progresses, from one mistake to the next, with an idealised past becoming a new paradise, a place that it perhaps never was. But there is no going back. Conflict has intervened. Lives have been lost and there will be more to follow. Marriages fail. There are short passionate affairs.

There is much imagined longing. Roma Tearne’s story thus meanders through its themes, but without ever concentrating on any particular one to create a lasting impression. The characters seem more confused than reflecting, more victims of events than their instigators. Wherever they are, they remain foreign.

Beyond the Schoolboy Fringe - Untold Stories by Alan Bennett

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett is something of a pot pourri. It starts with an autobiographical exploration of social and family origins, and then moves on to include occasional pieces on travel, architecture and art, copious diaries from 1996 to 2004, reflections on previous and current work and essays on contemporaries, educational experience and culture. The fact that it all hangs together beautifully is a result of its author’s consummate skills, both linguistic and perceptive.

Untold Stories takes its title from the autobiographical sketch that opens the book. Alan Bennett was the physically late-developing child of a family in the Armley district of Leeds, a northern English industrial city. His father was a butcher who owned two suits, both of which smelled of raw meat. His mother was the supporting pillar of the household, but was also prone to bouts of depression. As a child, Alan Bennett seemed to dream less than most. Perhaps he is still less than able to admit the breadth of his flights of fancy.

“With a writer the life you don’t have is as ample a country as the life you do and is sometimes easier to access.” This sounds remarkably like e e cummings, a character that would not usually be linked with someone as apparently domesticated as Alan Bennett. But reading all of Untold Stories, the reader is repeatedly struck by how much of the eventual content of Alan Bennett’s perceptive, witty and perspicacious writings has its origins within the four walls of the family home. Many of the values, assumptions, attitudes and standpoints, whose apparently unquestioning adoption by his fictional characters lead the listener to question them, arose from a wider family that feverishly tried to be mundane but, like all families, never achieved that goal. The family was, after all, made up of individuals, each of which had his or her own reality alongside unresolved and often shared misgivings. 

Thus, immediately, a writer has several lifetimes of real and imagined material. Alan Bennett, perhaps by virtue of having at least potentially crossed some of the chasms of social class that so profoundly divide British society, seems able to comment, often with no more than an occasional word or phrase, on those tentative but agreed assumptions that make us what we are. “Minor writers often convey a more intense flavour of their times than those whose range is broader and concerns more profound.”

But this, despite the authenticity of his flavours, is no minor writer. Not for a moment would anyone wish this writer’s passing, but there is no doubt that Alan Bennett’s work will live on, probably grow in stature as its ability to comment on the changing Britain of the twentieth century develops a sharper focus.

Essentially Alan Bennett comes across as a conservative type. He dresses and even looks like a 1950s schoolboy, visits churches to describe architectural details of selected tombs in Betjemanesque prose, probably doesn’t indulge in fusion cooking, shuns recognition, inhabits the inner city but is perhaps never quite at home there. But then there’s the anti-establishment side, the satirist, the overt homosexuality and general anti-bigwig mentality. 

And all of this from a First at Oxford. “But taste is no help to a writer. Taste is timorous, conservative and fearful. It is a handicap. Olivier was unhampered by taste and was often vulgar. Dickens similarly. Both could fail, and failure is a sort of vulgarity, but it’s better than a timorous toeing of the line.” Untold Stories is a long read, but one which offers a simple yet sophisticated joy from beginning to end. Alan Bennett revisits topics he has written about in the past. Miss Shepherd, The Lady In The Van is here, as are his early plays and Beyond The Fringe. So are Talking Heads and The History Boys. But throughout he selects and applies language with much wit and humour to offer apparently ephemeral perspectives on everyday life, perspectives that on reflection are anything but shallow. He is a man of taste, as revealed by his regular revulsion with Classic FM, but he is also an enigma because he keeps listening to it.

Kansas In August by Patrick Gale

Patrick Gale´s novel Kansas In August was an interesting, if never a very engaging read. It features some rather strange people. There is a man called Hilary and a woman called Henry. They are brother and sister. They share a lover, a bisexual guy called Rufus, but neither brother nor sister is aware of the situation because certain parties have used false names. (It seems that these people always want to be someone else.

Henry is the stronger character. She is a successful medic specialising in often threatening psychiatric cases. Hilary teaches music peripatetically. Some of the children he meets might benefit from the attentions of his sister. Rufus is a partially credible amalgam of a macho man, gay pride, anything, perhaps, that he can think of today. But it is the word “think” that seems to provide the greatest challenge for these people.

They are presented as contemporary Brits rattling around west London. It is apparently always snowing. There are constant strikes and various other social challenges that result in piles of rubbish permanently half-hiding the urban decay that lines the streets. There is much alcohol consumption and occasional drug abuse, probably conceived as recreational, despite the fact that no-one ever seems to have any money. Hilary finds a baby – yes, a real baby – abandoned in a cot. He seems to think that finders can be keepers and sets about being its foster parent. He seems to be under a personal impression that he can keep his find, as if he had discovered a stray dog or a dropped wallet. He sets about occasional feeding and watering, and takes it out once in a while to provide diversion.

A young Asian girl befriends him and develops a crush. And this character, remember, we have been told is au fait with teaching, schooling and other things related to youngsters. As I mentioned earlier, “thinking” seems to challenge these people. I admit to becoming rather confused as I read Patrick Gale´s novel. I found these people quite incredible and not very likeable. I did not understand and definitely did not empathise with any of their opinions or actions. They all seemed completely self-obsessed, rather crass and, crucially, unable to imaging anything beyond the end of the nose. Even immediate reality seemed to pass them by. But then, perhaps, that is contemporary Britain, something of a dross heap of selfishness. But, given west London and snow, why “Kansas” and why “August” remain two questions that still utterly defeat me.

Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd

Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem is quite simply a masterpiece. Every aspect of the novel is remarkable. It’s a whodunit, though it suggests a couple of credible suspects right at the start. It even convicts its central character to death by hanging before we have even got to know her. Clearly things are not going to be obvious. The novel is also a study in character, especially that of its central actor, Lambeth Marsh Lizzie, later Mrs Elizabeth Cree. It’s also an evocation of London in the late nineteenth century, complete with colours, smells, vistas and perspectives. 

It’s a highly literary work, ever conscious of its place beside the genres it skirts. Overall, it’s a wonderful example of how form can be used as inventively as plot to create a story. The novel has a series of interlocking stands. In one our anti-heroine, Lizzie, is accused of the murder of John Cree, her husband. In another, John Cree’s diary reveals certain secrets that not only he would have wanted to hide. In a third strand, we learn of Lambeth Marsh Lizzie’s past, how she came to a life in the theatre and how she met her husband. A fourth strand follows the career of Dan Leno, a music hall player, worshipper of the silent clown Grimaldi and mentor of Lizzie’s stage life. And in a fifth strand we see how, in a great city like London, our paths inevitably cross those of great thinkers, writers, artists and, of course, history itself. Peter Ackroyd thus has his characters cross the paths of a writer, George Gissing, and a thinker of note, one Karl Marx, as they tramp the streets of Limehouse after a day at the library. 

 As usual, sex has a lot to do with the relationships in the book. It is usually on top, but here it also comes underneath and sometimes on the side of events. Mrs Cree is accused of poisoning her husband. Their married life has been far from conventional, but are its inadequacies the motive for a series of brutal killings of prostitutes and others in the Limehouse area? As a result of the curious placement of certain trophies, the killings are attributed in the popular mind to a golem, a mythical creature made of clay that can change it shape at will. Karl Marx examines the Jewish myths surrounding the subject. Others steer clear of the subject. Lizzie continues on the stage until she meets her husband. She learns much stagecraft from Dan Leno and eventually resolves to help her husband to complete the play over which he has unsuccessfully laboured. When the book’s plot resolves, we are surprised, but then everything makes such perfect sense. And in a real piece of insight, Peter Ackroyd likens the mass murderer to Romaticism perfected, the ultimate triumph of individualism. There is much to stimulate the mind in this thriller. 

 A reader of this review might suspect that Dan leno And The Limehouse Golem is a difficult read, a book whose diverse strands never converge. But quite the contrary is true: it comes together in a wonderful, fast-flowing manner to a resolution that is both highly theatrical yet thoroughly credible. Read it many times. View the book on amazon Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

The Road Home by Rose Tremain

I approached Rose Tremain’s The Road Home expecting a vivid story drawn on a life of struggle, whose central character might grapple with life’s traumas, opportunities, joys and disappointments. I also expected that all of this would be placed in a setting where landscape, physical, social and psychological, but perhaps not political, would both inform and influence the characters’ lives. I was not disappointed, but for the most part I remained less than surprised, apart from the fact that Rose Tremain in The Road Home approached a contemporary political issue. 

The Road Home has modern day economic migration at its core. Lev is Polish. He has worked in a sawmill in his home town, the less than prosperous Baryn. He has a family and he used to be married. But now, as a single parent, despite the assistance of friends and family, he finds there is no future at home, no visible means of support. So he leaves for London on a bus in search, presumably, of streets paved with gold. On that journey he meets Lydia, a compatriot with connections and in some unlikely way or other they manage to stay in contact throughout the book.

Clearly their lives were never meant to intertwine, but circumstance, in The Road Home, is forever a local confinement. It simultaneously restricts and empowers, and then conspires with time to create a bond of friendship between Lev and Lydia that transcends class, interest, geography, expectation and assumption. Rose Tremain’s story takes Lev to different jobs, a kebab shop, two quite different restaurants, an old people’s home and a vegetable form. She has him encounter low life on the street, the high-brow in a concert hall, and also the other-worldly in a theatre. He spots pretence – it might not be that difficult! – but he also appreciated sincerity. He encounters self-obsession, honesty and love, always in unequal measure in every aspect of life. 

Eventually, his travels become both self-revelatory and enriching. He comes to terms with loss and turns the void in his life to personal gain. There is no fairy-tale get-rich-quick ending for Lev. The Road Home is no sugary advertisement for individuality, no attempted apology for market capitalism. This is a personal quest to cope with personal tragedy and unacceptable economic reality. The road does eventually lead home, but only when Lev and his destination have both been transformed. In their own way, neither is the same as they were at the start. 

And, I suppose, that’s the point. Life takes us wherever it goes. As it drags us along, either we learn and survive, or merely survive, or not. The process is given. The result is speculative. Lev survives. And he learns. He is a credible, real character, with a credible, real life. But there were aspects of The Road Home that I found disappointing. The scenario that adopted Lev at his destination was, for me, too isolated. Migrants often rely heavily on networks, but Lev has no contact save for Lydia, whom he met on the bus. He has no relatives to phone, nor friends, nor relatives of friends, nor someone from his home town who knew someone from somewhere else who just happened to be in business in Essex. This I found unlikely.

In a literary sense, this liberated Lev from his background and thus enabled Rose Tremain to layer upon his experience exactly what she wanted. This was convenient. It also rendered Lev’s point of view wholly individual. He apparently experienced everything in the naiveté of complete isolation, the foreignness of British behaviour thus presented as if seen in a laboratory analyst’s test tube. In this context, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Rose Tremain used Lev’s trials and tribulations merely as a vehicle to let off some steam about aspects of contemporary British culture that she finds abhorrent, embarrassing or reprehensible. This, and not Lev’s economic migration, is the rather failed political aspect of the book. Christy, Lev’s Irish live-in landlord, was rather more stereotypical than he needed to be. A plumber with a broken marriage and a drink problem might be plausible, but the last Irish plumber I met in London had so much work he earned a fortune and owned several London houses on which he collected rents. Maybe his name was Christy. Lev’s relationship with the eventually predictable Sophie also seemed unlikely. They worked together in a ground-breaking new restaurant, encountered the pretentiousness of a cutting-edge playwright and together even got involved in some social conscience. 

I would have no criticism here if Lev, throughout all this experience, had seemed more engaged, rather than experiencing everything as if he were merely a recipient. Out of your own context and background, you have the opportunity, even the right, to be super-opinionated, and this is a right that Lev seems to forego. Overall, The Road Home is an excellent read. Its characters are engaging and its events are eventually both credible and poignant. I felt, however, that it lived too much outside its principal figure’s psyche. But then it chose to concentrate on his experience of change, one aspect of which is travel, itself, rather than his responses and judgments. Sometimes travel itself intensifies responses, and it is possible that Lev’s experiences explore this aspect of experience. So when he returns home, as the book’s title requires he does, he is a changed man. But now he is also newly skilled, enriched and motivated. The Road Home does more than a little of that for the reader as well. View the book on amazon The Road Home

City Of Spades by Colin MacInnes

Colin MacInnes wrote City Of Spades over fifty years ago. At the time its depiction of London from an African immigrant’s point of view both shocked and revealed. I wondered whether a contemporary reader might now find its perspective hackneyed, its impact diminished by changes in attitudes towards race that we assume have happened in the intervening years. Half a century ago, the bones of Johnny Fortune’s story might have shocked. Somehow, at least for those anywhere near the issues, I doubt it. 

He arrives in London from Nigeria to study meteorology, an activity that, for a whole host of reasons, he manages singularly to avoid. A newly-appointed welfare officer is charged with the task of easing the exigencies of life for youngsters from the warmer parts of the Commonwealth who come to be weaned by the mother of the Empire. He is appointed to care for Johnny’s file. But before long, while Johnny designs his own curriculum, it is our young civil servant who is receiving the education, an education about the nature of his own society, or at least a side of it that he might previously have been totally and blissfully unaware.

Perhaps paradoxically, Johnny meets people who regularly do things that are less than legal. He encounters substances with their associated informal retail trade, dubious service-sector occupations with their associated facilitators, activities behind closed doors that would be unseemly at the street corner. In short, opportunities in several shapes and sizes appear at almost every step. And then, of course, the police turn up and try to call a halt to the party. Suffice it to say that Johnny Fortune’s fortunes lead to various encounters, some of which are within the law, and some with the law. Invariably, they involve little prosperity and even less formal learning. 

If the plot’s content might have shocked residents of areas outside inner London in the late 1950s, then today it would not. Times certainly have changed. But then shock was not the book’s intent, even fifty years ago. Shock would have encouraged exaggeration which Colin MacInnes only ever suggests to create comedy. What City of Spades tries to do, in my opinion, is question those assumptions we all make about the nature of our society, our identity, our ideas of culture, nationality and history. And the book still manages to achieve this, because those themes, if not their settings, are eternal. I was reminded, on this reading, of The Rake’s Progress. When we follow the exploits of Tom Rakewell, we make allowances that accommodate differences between eighteenth century life and its contemporary manifestation in order to see through to the principles and ideas. We do not, for instance, need to believe that Nick Shadow is actually the embodiment of The Devil, as advertised, to understand the folly of Tom’s decision to seek personal aggrandisement in London rather than a slower-paced but perhaps more sincere provincial predictability. We do, however, have to understand a certain moral landscape in order to interpret the schemes that Tom pursues, despite the fact that they now seem strange and a tad unlikely. It’s in this spirit, I believe, that we should approach City Of Spades in order to identify, experience and understand much in the work that clearly transcends merely historical significance.

Also like The Rake’s Progress, City Of Spades is a highly witty and humorous look at some aspects of its contemporary society. In the latter’s case, it reveals double standards relating to race, class difference and a host of societal characteristics whose existence received middle class sentiment might seek to deny. Nowadays, we might see many of these revelations as highly unremarkable, despite the fact that, for many, they remain not quite mundane. Colin MacInnes’s City Of Spades still retains the ability to make its point in its original, apparently durable terms. In the 1950s, a stereotypical view of Britishness might have included claims to trust, honesty, integrity in public life, a police force that was the toast of the earth and a society that both cared for the vulnerable and had time to love animals. In City Of Spades, Johnny Fortune had drugs planted on him, was beaten up in custody and lived ordinarily in layer of society whose existence the polite either denied or ignored. But then he has African. Times don’t change. But the title might have. View this book on amazon City of Spades

Piano recital by Elena Lasco, classical artist meets jazz virtuoso

During a recital some years ago, a pianist introduced a Chopin Impromptu by describing its improvisatory essence, likening it to a snapshot of perhaps transient musical ideas, a significant but mere facet of genius. After the concert, a regular at our private gatherings took issue with the pianist. “How could we, the listeners, possibly know that such a piece was largely improvisatory unless you told us? Isn’t it all just written down, composed music?” The pianist politely declined to engage, since the customer is always right. “Just listen!” ought to have been her response. Contrary to much popular belief, improvisation has played a large part in the development of so-called “classical” music. 

Not only Chopin was noted for a brilliance of passing invention. Beethoven improvised. Listen to the Sonata Opus 111 – especially under the fingers of Rudolf Buchbinder – with an expectation of jazz. There’s a whole sequence somewhere between boogie-woogie and ragtime – from a hundred years before anyone else thought of either! Bach improvised. After all, there’s a whole raft of his compositions called “inventions”. 

An improvisatory quality introduces a sense of genuine surprise into the musical flow of a piece, a tangent to the argument that can conjure the unexpected. Many pianists also include improvisatory elements in performance. It’s nothing more than an element of what we generally refer to as interpretation. A hint of rubato for some might be a lack of accuracy, whereas for others it’s interpretive genius. Similarly, new improvisatory approaches to the Baroque ground bass are perhaps closer to how it would have been played originally than the mechanically ground-out pluck of more recent past decades. 

There are times, of course, when an improvisatory approach, however minimal, would be inappropriate. I cannot imagine Webern played in any other way than indicated in his micro-managed scoring. And for all its jazz-like elements, minimalism works because of its obsession with the detail of infinitesimal change, detail that would be lost if either over-worked or over-stated. Now despite these close bonds between so-called “classical” music and improvisation, I usually avoid anything that purports to link the approaches. The experience of “classical” celebrities “crossing over” generally generates muzak. When popular artists join “classical” friends, the artistic, if not financial, result is usually embarrassment for both. Carla Bley, Frank Zappa and Keith Jarrett might exemplify a counter-argument. But then where would you site such talents in the first place? Menuhin and Grappelli collaborated successfully, despite Menuhin describing the experience as vamping while an improvisatory genius played for ever without once repeating himself. No doubt the awe would have flowed in the opposite direction if the material had been Elgar. 

So it was with some trepidation that I approached Elena Lasco’s recital in May 2009 in L’Alfas del Pi. Forming part of the unique Spain-Norway Festival hosted by this little Norwegian town on Spain’s Costa Blanca, Elena Lasco’s concert advertised a classical and jazz programme, but thankfully no cross-over, which would only have made me over-cross. In the first half, Elena Lasco played a set of Schumann Variations, Grieg’s Norwegian Dances and Cordoba and Seguidillas by Albeniz. Make no mistake, however. Elena Lasco is no part-time classical pianist. She studied for ten years in Moscow’s Tchaikowsky Academy and was already something of a prodigy as well. Her pianistic and interpretive skills are from the top drawer. When one adds to that five years of master classes in the famous Jazz Academy of Moscow’s Gnesin Academy the mix is not just virtuosic and persuasive – it’s totally convincing. 

The rhythmic fluidity matched with complete control that she brings to pieces like the deceptively demanding Norwegian Dances of Edvard Grieg render them nothing less than a revelation. Albeniz always does benefit from rhythmic fluidity, in my opinion. It adds a commentary to the angularity and occasional abruptness of his style. And even in the Schumann the suggestion of an improvisatory edge merely added to both the drama and virtuosity. 

The second half of Elena Lasco’s Alfas recital was devoted to jazz standards and her own compositions. Appropriately we heard a homage to Errol Garner alongside some standards from the golden years of jazz. Elena Lasco’s improvisations are impressively inventive and always swing. We are transported to the world of Garner or Peterson, not Cecil Taylor or even McCoy Tyner. It’s a jazz Romanticism, infused with the personal, the memorable and occasionally the spectacular, but only for its melodic or rhythmic impact, never merely to impress. It’s a style that does not aim to confuse or obfuscate. This is musical story-telling at its most communicative. On 15 October 2009, Elena Lasco will make her London debut in the Conway Hall. She will present a jazz programme and entry to the concert will be free. Again she will feature jazz standards alongside her own compositions. Londoners will thus have the chance to experience what the privileged full house at the Spain-Norway Festival in L’Alfas del Pi lapped up in May, or indeed what Elena Lasco’s 200 million Russian television audience could not get enough of. Elena Lasco’s is a unique mix of talent and style.

The Line Of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

It can be no coincidence that Nick, the Oxford graduate who comes to stay, has the surname Guest. The Feddes invite him into their London home, Kensington Park Gardens, no less, because he has been a pal of their son, Toby, at university. Head of household, Gerald, is a Tory MP, elected by the good people of Barwick in Northamptonshire to represent their interests. It’s a county that always elects Tories, even when they close down the local steelworks, even when they candidates might appear unelectable.

Gerald, like everyone else in The Line Of Beauty, however, seems to be interested only in representing himself, a pursuit he achieves, again like everyone else, with partial competence. And then there’s Catherine, the Feddens’ unstable daughter who is on lithium, consistently referred to as librium within the family. Wani Ouradi, Antoine to officialdom, is the son of a Lord of Lebanese origin. The family owns a chain of supermarkets. Wani eventually has sufficient resources to buy up a piece of central London so that it can be redeveloped into premises to house a magazine venture destined from the start to sell no more than a copy or two. But then it will be something for Nick Guest to do with his spare time.

The characters in Nick Hollinghust’s book never really seem to be required to worry about the consequences of their actions. Leo is something different. He’s a council worker, and black, and not rich. An odd man out? He plays a significant role in the early part of the book, and later reappears when his family report he has dies of AIDS. The core of the book, it seems, is its sexuality. Nick Guest, along with several other characters, is gay. These people are not just homosexuals, however. They project an air of public display, men who wear their sexuality like a school tie. Perhaps they are not alone in that. So Nick has his fling with Leo. He has clearly flung with Toby and flings far and wide with Wani. The image of these rich young men having it off in smelly, locked lavs will live on after the book, but not for long. Nick regularly refers to Henry James, the quotations appearing like commentaries to the action.

Personally, the setting and characters reminded me more of Anthony Powell, who often inhabited similar social echelons. Powell’s characters can be every bit as devious, selfish, self-obsessed, fickle and ignorant as anyone in The Line Of Beauty. The difference, however, is that Powell’s upper crust speaks of misdemeanours in hushed tones. His is still an era of closets and his characters at least try to lock their skeletons therein. Alan Hollinghurst’s desirables, however, apparently want their skeletons in the shop window, mobile and, apparently, bent double before them.

And it’s not just the gay sex that’s traded, since cocaine and dope figure large as well, for the book inhabits the 1980s, the era when, we were told, wealth and riches flowed in the direction of merit, thus auto-confirming its sense of superiority and right. Eventually each of the intellectually muscled, self-seeking morons that populate The Line Of Beauty comes up against limitations. Some of these are personal, others beyond control. Scandal emerges and AIDS takes its toll of gay abandon. Nick’s guest status is questioned. He seems to take the blame for everyone else’s shortcomings. He seems to walk away saying, “Good while it lasted”, a motto that might have applied to the book, but it didn’t. The characters and their rarefied lives were eventually interesting, finally engaging.

Those things that Anthony Powell’s characters would have hidden are not only in the open but are flouted. And then, when comeuppance comes up, it seems that nothing will stick, nothing will damage any of them. And so this particular reader felt that their contribution to humanity might not reach the positive. Thus the story leaves a question. Is it voyeuristic, satirical, or merely horribly descriptive?

 View this book on amazon The Line of Beauty

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

A review should always try to address its subject in its own terms. The purpose, after all, is many-sided, to summarise, paraphrase, contextualise, all with the express intention of informing a potentially interested participant of the nature of the experience on offer. Any proffered review that merely says I did or did not like it is thus entirely specious, since it conveys nothing of the work in focus, only the doubly-uninterpretable reaction of a dismembered, effectively anonymous opinion.

So in the case of Brick Lane by Monica Ali a dutiful list of the elements must begin with the setting. For the majority non-Londoners, Brick Lane is a market street in East London. It is just up the road from the eastern fringes of the City of London, the financial centre that boasts gleaming towers and vast wealth. (Or perhaps it once did!)

But over the years Brick Lane has been a magnet for new migrants, communities marginalised by both origin and destination. It has also been a centre for political action of all shades. The current occupants of this social clearing house are Bangladeshis and the street, in particular, has become a centre for Bangladeshi culture and food.

So, at the centre of Monica Ali’s novel is a Bangladeshi woman, Nazneen, who arrives in Britain to meet her husband, Chanu, an apparently slobbering slob, imbued with more social manners than domestic. But arrangement suffices, as Nazneen learns to cope with married life in a foreign place in which she has no ties and little communication. Nazneen’s experience in London’s Brick Lane is juxtaposed via an exchange of letters with the parallel experience of Hasina, her sister in Bangladesh. The two women’s experiences eventually diverge as local pressures demand decision and action. The contrasts, along with the considered tensions between white working class racism and Muslim identity promotion in east London ought to provide a powerful vehicle with which to explore worlds of culture, experience, relationships and ideology.

Brick Lane, unfortunately, falls short of every destination. Unfortunately again, the characters are weak, the artifice feels false, the vibrant location is portrayed as dull and the passions of ideological difference are confused and politically limp or naive. Brick Lane was an ambitious project, but it began confused and lost direction as it progressed. It does have its moments, but its hours are long, and not a little tedious.

View this book on amazon Brick Lane

Please Sir, There’s A Snake In The Art Room by Keith Geddes

In Please Sir, There’s A Snake In The Art Room author Keith Geddes has his principal character, Tom Thorne, address a series of challenges. Thorne, this principal character, is a pre-school principal, or headmaster, depending of the regime in question. His first task is to manage and strengthen a Twickenham prep-school, to bolster its students’ performance in common entrance exams. Along the way he has to deal with unruly parents, some of which are so despicably attractive that they quite put his off his stroke.

There are problem teachers, some of whom scheme, wheel and deal, or even take days off sick. There are, inevitably, students. Some of them perform, others under-perform. Some are almost anonymous, while some excel. There are sports fixtures where the school could do better, and there are success stories that outnumber the disappointments. And amid this, Tom Thorne finds himself a new wife, a new family and, believe it or not, a new job. Tom takes up the challenge of a headship in a Kenyan school, near the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi, right on the boundary of the Game Park.

There he institutes a similar mix of curriculum reform, staff management, pupil stewardship and parental relationship that he used in Twickenham and, you’ve guessed it, things work out well. Tom is certainly kept busy. In addition, Kenya provides him with occasional experiences that Twickenham would not, such as snakes, hippos, lions and even flowering plants.

Please Sir, There’s A Snake In The Art Room is not really a novel. In the tradition of Gervase Phinn, it’s more like a fictionalised professional diary, a diary containing the things that were too unprofessional to put in the real thing. It remains of interest to a general reader, because we have all been to school and so we can all empathise with the events, many of which are displayed with considerable humour. Head teacher Tom Thorne, we realise quite early on, bears a strong resemblance to a certain Keith Geddes, whose own life history has witnessed the exact transformations that the author inflicts on his fictional hero.

And so Keith Geddes’s book begins to read more like an autobiography than fiction. It is an anecdotal, light and light-hearted depiction of the professional and personal challenges that a head teacher has to address. And throughout it is also an enjoyable and often humorous experience for both pupils and teachers, despite the fact that navigating its waters is rarely plain sailing.

View this book on amazon Please Sir, There's A Snake In The Art Room

The End Of The Affair by Graham Greene

Anyone who has lived in London could place the Common that forms a geographical centrepiece in The End Of The Affair by Graham Greene. It doesn’t really matter if it’s the particular place one thinks it is, because it’s what happens in the houses at or near its periphery that is central to the book. And the relationships between man and woman, between classes, between interests could be anywhere.

Maurice Bendrix is a resident of the suburban, unfashionable, southern extremity of the open space. He has rented rooms in which he labours over his writing. He is a novelist with several books and some critical acclaim to his name. He is a passionate man, a sceptic, perhaps in every sense, and he is nothing less than scheming in the way that he manipulates friends, acquaintances and probably anyone in order to conduct his research, and perhaps to secure his other interests as well.

It was during one such foray into the mind of a fictional civil servant he was trying to invent that he began to see Sarah Miles. She was the wife of a real civil servant and the affair was constructed to enter her husband’s mind, though it took a more conventional initial route. Sarah and Henry, her ministry mandarin husband, live in a large freehold on the fashionable north side of the Common.

One feels that, left entirely to his own devices, Maurice would not have a great deal in common with the lifestyle of the Miles household. But when he meets Sarah, he finds a passionate woman whose devotion to the institution of her marriage is not matched by the satisfaction she derives from it. Sarah’s frustrations are great, her needs are obvious, and the affair with Maurice ignites. Their passionate, highly physical affair lasts some years. One day in 1944, however, a robot bomb lands outside Maurice’s house and he is injured in the blast. Initially Sarah thinks he is dead. Then, somehow, their relationship ends, maybe because she seems almost disappointed that he has survived.

They see nothing of one another for two years. Maurice, of course, assumes she has moved on to richer pastures, to another more novel lover, who can satisfy her demands in new, less committed ways. He hires a private detective to check on her. He talks to her husband and others with whom she has been acquainted. What he discovers is a surprising change of direction in her life and her priorities, a change that neither he nor Sarah’s husband can either explain or accept.

Ultimately The End Of The Affair is about the space between people. Relationships are always limited, no matter how intimately they are shared. The Common, the geographical space between Maurice and Sarah, becomes a symbol of the no man’s land that must be crossed when people interact. We enter into this territory when it is our intention to go part-way to meet the psyche of another, but perhaps we never really leave home. The territory can only be entered, but probably not crossed, when there is mutuality, at least a partially shared desire to meet in the unsafe space. But it remains a position that can be retracted, a space that can be abandoned at will.

But what emerges in The End Of the Affair is that this space is specific to particular relationships. Scratch the surface of a different association of that same person, and it will reveal a different territory, perhaps not even sharing recognisable landmarks with the first. Perhaps, therefore, we project onto others what we want them to be. Perhaps relationships are never really shared, and remain at best pragmatic and, more likely, ultimately selfish. In the end, The End Of The Affair suggests that they are not, but it is only a suggestion.

View this book on amazon The End of the Affair (Vintage Classics)

Protesters - a short story

A sharp closing of the door left the two men together yet alone, strangers, introduced merely seconds before. The older, taller of the two seemed to scrutinise the stockier new arrival for a few moments, his penetrating gaze noting the military dress that remained less than a uniform alongside the almost apologetic manner he projected. They had fallen silent after their mutual acknowledgement, the elderly man’s gripped handshake accompanied by a stentorian, lengthened “Hello”, the younger man’s hesitant nod, plus a hand quickly withdrawn. During an extension of that same silence, shared at the room’s edge by its only window, they surveyed the line of protesters below. The quiet that filled the room, a quiet left after the noisy departure of the usher who had just led the younger man up from the street, soon began to fade. Sounds of chanting, angry sloganising, hardly rhythmic from this admixture of universally blue-suited, tone-deaf Englishmen, filtered through the draught cracks around the quartered frame. There were no discernible words, the shouted slogans becoming a mere murmur of unrest from their distance.

Almost in unison, their joint gaze lifted from the side street below the high window, a side street that they had both needed to lean into the recess to view, so that now they looked across the great square, great not in size, but perhaps in claimed significance. Ahead was the mother of parliaments, a mock-Gothic imitation of the grandiose, a pretender to an assumed aesthetic, re-invented as fashion demanded. Before it, almost insignificant, set down below pavement level, they could both visualize from memory the statue of the great protector, stolid in defiance, solid in his defence of the right to speak within those walls, a right too often challenged by those who lay as corpses in the opulence opposite. For there, to the right of the two observers lay the confessor’s church, the abbey of royalty that a true perpetrator of terror adorned with a fan vault to decorate his own death, a chapel that seemed to thrust threateningly towards the palace of speech it faced, an older palace of speech, long destroyed, long superseded.

“In its present, history is always a lie,” said the older, taller of the two men.

The other maintained his silence for a while. He turned to face his companion, to look him up and down, to note the establishment feel of his blue three-piece suit with its pronounced watch-chain presenting almost a seal of office across the midriff. He was tall, this writer, stately, even dignified, his eighty years now generating a slight stoop when he moved, just a hint of roundness in the spine, whose imagined rigidity suggested the stance of a once proud young man. The smaller man seemed uncomfortable in the writer’s presence, as if he knew what to say, but not where to start. There was a sense of both deference and discomfort, a respect tinged with something less trusting. The older man’s reputation and achievement preceded him and, in later years, he had learned how to inhabit and dominate the respected space this inevitably generated.

“I would guess that you have brought no written speech,” said the younger man, the non-sequitur not itself worthy of remark. “But then I would have expected that. After all, you are a writer.”

The old man smiled a little, without averting his gaze, which still apparently concentrated on the beauty of the abbey’s spires, the grandeur of its tower, the power of its glory. “No,” he said, pausing again, as if wishing to perpetuate an ambiguity as to whether he had no speech or whether he was denying that he was ever a writer. For several seconds the older man rocked gently from side to side, transferred his weight from one foot to the other in the manner that a recently consulted nurse had suggested as a means of keeping his aging legs supple. She realised, an hour later, that she had no cause to worry about the state of the old man’s plumbing, which by then she had experienced in full working order. But still the writer took her advice and hopped, just a little. He then turned to face the younger man, the slight downward attitude of the head inevitably suggesting condescension.

“I have to work to my notes,” said the smaller man, averting his eyes just enough to attain an independent angle. “In my position I cannot ad lib, even if I feel I’m capable of doing it. I always have to make doubly sure that every word plays a calculated part in the whole message. One cannot be too careful. I cannot risk a single word being misinterpreted.” He patted the left breast of his military-style camouflage jacket and then flicked the lapel aside with his right hand so that he could retrieve a folded sheaf of hand-written sheets from the inside pocket. He began to read. “Muchas gracias por su solidaridad…”

“You will speak in Spanish?”

“Yes. And with an interpreter. As I said, we have to ensure that our words are clear, unambiguous, saying precisely what we mean and only what we mean. There is no room for error. There are those waiting to gather ammunition against us.”

“No pasaran!” said the old man as he gave the other’s upper arm a firm squeeze with his out-turned left hand. It was a strange gesture, a reverse, backhand expression of support, firm in its conviction, ambiguous in its sincerity. The younger man smiled, suddenly and obviously more at ease, less in awe of this great name’s perceived distance. “But your English is perfect, fluent”, continued the writer. “Why not speak to us directly in our own tongue?”

The younger man only shrugged, as if to imply that a question with an obvious answer need not be asked. “As a writer,” he said at last, “you know that language must be precise…”

“...and so a problem, should it arise, can always be put down to poor translation?” A silence from the other signified agreement. “And so the politician can retain deniability, even if that was in fact what you meant to say? A side exit from the trap of duplicity?”

“It would never be my intention to deceive…”

“But if the charge arose, you could sidestep it without confronting it? Shall we say that you could find an avenue of convenience?”

The younger man kept his silence for a minute or more, during which time he stared again at the thin but noisy line of blue-suited protesters in the road below. He noted for the first time that they all seemed to be in their early or mid-twenties. They were so similar in appearance they might all have been selected for the role. Wanted: official agitators, he mused. Blue suit, aged twenty to thirty, head shaven to at least a number two.

He then turned back into the room to face the writer. “But then words are your tools, your stock in trade - I think that is the correct English idiom – so you know perfectly well how important it is to have exactly the right word in the right place. You would never make a mistake.”

The writer laughed. “My dear man,” he began, now turning to pace towards the room’s centrally placed, heavy walnut but dull-topped table, “You invest in me credibility, talent and invention beyond my worth. I am but a story teller, a literary fraud whose imaginings occasionally, and for just an hour or two, might light up the dull lives of blighters like those down below. I churn out the literary equivalent of B-movies for residents of suburban semis. Words? I’ve spawned millions of them, drivelled them out like torrents of wanked sperm, onanised only on the stony ground of the popular imagination – an oxymoron for sure.” His pause was pure theatre, calculated to maintain his hold of the flow and, at the same time, to add emphasis to his words and retain control, measured to keep the other silent. With apparent impatience, he retrieved the cigarettes and lighter he had previously tossed carelessly onto the table-top from a hand that had been summoned to shake its greeting with the newly arrived president of the republic. The old writer’s right hand had fiddled a cigarette from the pack, his left hand had lit it and he had already taken a long, deep, settling drag before the instant elapsed. When he spoke again, it was as if there had never been a break in his flow, his words now animated by loose clouds of smoke, particles that clipped the edge off his voice. “These people just do as they are told. They see us as we are sold to them. Today a performing monkey that writes books and an ogre who threatens their freedom. Tomorrow performing monkeys are cast as illiterate and the ogre is a partner in trade. Joe Soap does what Joe Soap is told to do. A whim is less fickle than popular consciousness.”

“So is your support for our cause such a whim? Will you oppose tomorrow what you support today?” The younger man’s voice was harder, more forthright in its continued deference.

“It rather depends on you and your people – your phrase, by the way,” replied the writer. Here the word ‘people’ clearly did not refer to an agglomerated populace, but a clique whose existence the writer was keen to suggest. “We all know whom we oppose. We know what we are against. It’s what we are for that perennially confuses us, especially when we are confronted with the complications of interpreting a reality that we only imagine.”

The younger man now moved away from the window. Stepping slowly, thoughtfully, his face downcast, he began to amble a wide arc around the table, the old writer at its centre, a stalking of sorts. He pressed his fingertips together, forming a cat’s cradle across a stomach that the other judged would fill out in a few years, thus transforming the current stocky athleticism into a portly middle age that would no longer be flattered by the military fatigues he currently wore.

When the younger man stopped and turned, he looked up to see that the old man still faced the window, stood erect, taking staccato drags from his cigarette, each accompanied by an audible suck of the lips. It’s ironic that I should address his back, he thought. “And exactly whom do you oppose? Or should I more precisely ask whom do you currently oppose, since in the past your allegiance to any cause has been – let’s say – variable…?”

“My dear man, Mr President,” said the writer, smiling, as he turned to face his inquisitor, “every man has his price. Take Joe Soap in the street down there, for instance” he said, nodding towards the window, now behind him, “You don’t think that any of those snotty nosed Johns of city clerks actually believe the rhetoric about your regime? Do you think that a twenty-two year old moron who spends all day wheeling trays of punched cards around the bowels of a bank’s computer centre for subsistence pay goes home of an evening to read and analyse Heritage Foundation reports on the communist take-over of Central America? He doesn’t do that any more than he comparatively tests all available brands of soap powder before buying his Omo – except on reflection he probably wouldn’t buy that one on the grounds of being embarrassed by associations with its name. No, he gets led by the nose to the Daz and he buys it. He goes along with the tide, we might say. The trick of manipulating the popular imagination, oxymoronically, of course, is to cover all the options, to back all sides. The trick is to convince Joe Soap that he needs washing powder and then to cartelise the shelves with an agreed and shared presence. Whatever brand decisions he makes are utterly irrelevant because the big guys who run his brain have the market carved up between them. Politically, his brain space, albeit quite small, is fully occupied with propagandistic threats to his lifestyle, threats that might restrict his right to detergent choice, a human right worth fighting for.”

“And it is your view that your books are just more soap powder?”

“Precisely, dear fellow. Precisely.” The writer turned away again, puffing to pursue the production of ash.

The younger man ambled forward again as the writer turned his back. Legally trained, the young president of the republic found himself thrust back into the profession to which he had aspired, but had never practised, his studies having been interrupted by what a respectful obituary might describe as brushes with the authorities. He was stalking his witness, here a writer confined within a dock of his own invention, perhaps imagination. It was to become a cross-examination. “But I’ve read your work - almost all of it, though I admit that most was in Spanish translation. Maybe something was gained in translation, but I always felt that your so-called, self-professed mere stories, entertainments, always had their deeper side, another level no less, where the characters and the situations in which you placed them epitomised moral conflict, ideological questions which they always at least tried to address. Indeed you, the writer, the creator, always seemed to want a moralistic resolution to your characters’ dilemmas.” The president paused to look the writer in the eye, but the taller man’s gaze was fixed ahead, above his level, blankly concentrated on the mechanics of drawing smoke. “So you would deny,” he continued, “that what I read into your work was ever intended? It was a mere figment of my furtive, youthful imagination?”

“Leading question. Counsel should not put words into the mouths of the witness,” said the old man, choosing his words with intricate care whilst fixing a stare at his inquisitor in time with the very end of the phrase.

“Ah”, interrupted the other, uncharacteristically immediate in his interjection. “So not only do you know detail of my education, you want to play judge as well! Is that it? Is that the key? You want to claim the status of inconsequence, the mere story teller, whilst, somewhere in your unwritten estimation, you believe you hold the ultimate truth, the end point, the last word, the judgment?” A smile began to lift the curves of the black moustache that dominated his face, his rimless spectacles lifting a little on flexed cheek muscles.

“Judge?” replied the old writer. “Judgment? You sound like a Christian.”

“I am.”

“Well I’m not.”

“You are a Roman Catholic. You converted. Everyone knows that”.

“Pragmatism, my dear boy. Pure pragmatism. The old girl demanded it. It was the only way I could get my end away with her… a state I yearned for so much I would have topped myself if I hadn’t succeeded. Not that it did me a whole lot of good in the end. She turned out to be stretched frigid with guilt, a guilt I could not penetrate, a need to appease the wrath of a loving God she knew hated her, her alone.”

“And so you looked elsewhere?”

“Well documented. Well known, as you might say.” The old man fumbled for another cigarette, lit it and tossed the pack and lighter carelessly back onto the table. “You don’t smoke, of course.”

It was an intended diversion, a plea for the re-establishment of shallow politeness. The ploy was ignored. “I approach the problem in entirely the opposite sense”, said the other. “I was a Catholic, a devout believer, and I’m happily married to a woman I hope will live for ever. But we are shunned by our church, shunned because of my politics, shunned because of the ideology I have espoused, a philosophy the bishops call godless.”

“In the words of a famous economist,” began the writer, his manner beginning to approach the patronizing as he paused for a moment to signify the unearthing of an aphorism, “in the long term we are all dead. Gods, godlessness, ideology, alienation, they all become as significant as a flake of this”. He tapped his cigarette, causing a tip of ash to fall and disintegrate on the carpet.

“So what motivates you?” asked the former trainee lawyer, pursuing again his original point.

“A quick fuck. A good bottle. Dope. And then another fuck. The here and now is all we have…”

“Even though sometimes you try to bring even that to an end?” The lawyer’s question was fast, calculated and completely disarming, delivered with a politician’s panache for locating a weakness and exploiting it.

“You have done your research well. I suppose one of your ‘people’ read all the sordid biographies just to prepare you for this evening?”

“No. I knew already. As I said, I’ve read much of your work. I have the ultimate respect…”

“Ultimate? A good word for a head of state to use.”

“I have no intention to pull rank, sir,” replied the younger man. “What I say will always be true, always honest.”

“Yes, It’s common knowledge, if any form of knowledge can be described as common.” The old writer took a long noisy drag on his cigarette and ambled back towards the window. “It’s a conundrum the hoi polloi never face. The worker ant stays in line. The experience, therefore, is always one of perceived unimpeded progress, of unblocked pathways to repeat the humdrum of existence and its duties. The fact that the way is cleared in the first place and kept free by the work of the soldiers, those with the duty to explore, to remove the danger, to clear the way, this is never known, let alone understood by the Joe Soap workers. They assume the mundaneness of their lives is a norm, not an achievement created by the efforts of others.”

“Or a conspiracy …..”

“A process of management, let’s call it, to use the vocabulary of the market age. Our protestors chant their slogans; their leaders feed them with more; they learn to regurgitate.”

“And what about our supporters? Those hundreds filling the hall below?”

The old writer turned a little and cocked his head, as if feeling the air for sound. He realised that the chants of “No pasaran! No pasaran!” that filtered along the maze of corridors to their waiting room must be deafening inside the auditorium. “I apologise for the crudity of my sweeping logic. But even you, Mr President, even you would acknowledge that the supporters are a minority, dwarfed by the opposition, a piss in the ocean compared to the torrents that oppose you?”

“Today, maybe. Tomorrow, who knows? That’s why we are both here. We both know what we oppose. And I, at least, know what I support.”

“Today….”

“No. Much longer than that. Just as I know a little about you, then I’m sure that you know something of me. My politics are not the clothes I put on yesterday. I’ve been committed to the work for justice and human rights for over twenty years. I am also a patriot – not a nationalist, a patriot. I want to achieve progress for my people, my country, but not at the expense of suffering for others. You know my history.”

Both men knew they had reached a critical juncture. There was a sense of threat on the edge of these last words, a malice that the professedly libertarian old writer sensed the more keenly. Ill at ease, he tried to divert. “When we’re on the podium, old boy, then we will know the shape of things. I don’t doubt that there are many out there who passionately support your cause. But there are others who are with you only to oppose a shared enemy. And there are others, perhaps many of them, who aren’t members of your audience at all.”

“I don’t understand,” said the other, though he did.

“I’m sorry. I forget that it’s your first time in our green and pleasant land. You will see. Watch them when you speak. There will be many who stand and cheer. But for every three or four doing that, there will be a man – always a man – still in his seat, apparently a spectator, apparently indifferent. Except, of course, he won’t be looking at you. He knows who you are. It’s the identity of those in the audience that interests him. Ostensibly, he is in the audience to protect you. Like the gazelle he probably isn’t, it’s his job to leap onto anyone who looks like they are about to shoot you. After all, you are a head of state.”

“Policemen. Secret Service men.”

“Precisely. The place will be packed with them.”

“It’s a pity,” said the young president, “that there weren’t more of them down there when I arrived. There’s sixty or seventy of those thugs...”

“In Britain they are called Young Conservatives by the way,” said the old writer with a punctuating guffaw.

“...and there was only a handful of policemen. They were throwing things, tomatoes, bags of flour... Is that the way visiting heads of state are greeted?”

“It depends on who invited you, old bean.”

“Also on what I represent?”

“No, only who invited you.”

“So what do you recommend? Should I start my speech by inviting all the spooks to stand up and take a bow? Should I invite all of our supporters to applaud them in a show of magnanimity and humility? Should I call for a vote of thanks in recognition of their protection of my safety and with it the integrity of our revolution?”

“Waste of time. Nice gesture, but it would be taken as a sign of weakness.”

The old writer paused, his tone indicating that he remained in mid-flow, that second thoughts about what was to follow had stayed his tongue.

“And you, of course,” said the younger man, his voice expressing an assumed continuation of the other’s perceived meaning, “ought to know, because you used to be one of them. That was when, presumably, you also knew what you opposed.”

“They paid my bills. It was a job. I was a worker ant.”

“And throughout you were a conscientious and loyal employee. You did what was asked, opposed those who opposed. And, I suppose, you did what you did because of your own patriotism, a noble cause and supreme motivation for an Englishman, I understand.”

“Wherever did you hear that? I merely did what I was told. Patriotism is something the English, in particular, despise amongst themselves. Abroad, or in the company of foreigners – a term that includes everyone who does not think like oneself – the English become fiercely patriotic, but it is always motivated by profit. If the returns aren’t there, the retreat can be swift, indeed.” The tall old man looked his partner in the eye, pausing as if to assess the merit of continuing, as if to assess the impact of the words that might follow before he dare speak them. The young leader thought that this might be the pose that the nation would choose to immortalise the man in bronze after his death. “Your revolution is a privileged state…”

“We are threatened from every side…”

The old man turned away, held up the palm of his right hand to stay the other’s words. “It’s privileged because you know where you stand. And that’s a luxury. You will be defeated, of course, but only temporarily. Your cause will triumph in the long term…”

“…when we are all dead…”

“Indeed. But your cause has integrity. It will be resurrected, maybe many times, and each time it will forge progress towards its goal. In Britain, we still continue to stuff ourselves with the illusion that our total defeat in the war was, in fact, a victory. The fact that we were not invaded convinces people that we won. We were on the winning side, but we lost the war. Ask them why the true victor demanded the complete dismantling of the British Empire, the ceding of our oil-rich territories in the Middle East, the adoption of an independent nuclear deterrent that we never had the right to use, and the requirement that we always send troops, always under the empire command, to any conflict that the empire chooses to pursue, and they will look at you blank-faced in ignorance. Our cause, our patriotism you might say, is corrupt. It’s a false consciousness, as false as people’s conviction that their consumer choices really exist. So when I worked for the services, we did the empire’s job. We had no choice. We knew who our real master was, and we knew we worked to further that interest, which had subsumed anything that we might call our own. Patriotism was not even on the agenda, because we could no longer identify what it was. So we did what we were told.”

“Plus a little more, on occasions.” It was a lawyer’s insistence, coupled with the politician’s opportunism that rendered this statement a question that demanded immediate response.

“I was not born rich,” said the old man, now leaning forward a tad more, his stoop an assertion. “Like any other human being I took a job. It paid the rent. A steelworker doesn’t necessarily believe in the ingot he is forging. A miner does not dig ideologically to supply the furnaces of capitalism.”

“But a man does not join an intelligence service devoted to fighting communism in order to dig coal.”

“It paid the rent. And I did other things on the side – for reasons of ….”

“Integrity? Truth? Conscience?”

“Lord, no! Pragmatism, as ever.”

The younger man held fire for a while. It was the right time to introduce the point, but the language was difficult to find. “So this would explain your current status. Patriotism, that which an outsider might presume you pursued when you worked for your government, was always a purely business arrangement. They paid you and you served them. And now they no longer pay you, so the patriotism evaporates and you become a tax exile. So you have no country apart from the self.”

“e e cummings, I believe?”

The younger man was silent, taken aback. A look of gentle confusion spread across his face. The tack he had planned had been undermined by this unexpected turn.

The older man sensed the other’s vulnerability and laughed. Intellect had once again granted an upper hand that was his to exploit, but he chose not to use his knowledge to control. “An American poet,” he said, calmly, “who broke all the rules, broke them so completely he recast what he did as a new system, a new set of rules. The artist’s only inevitable country is himself. You, Mr President, will never be an artist. You do not have the qualifications. For one, you have integrity, and lack the selfishness required.”

“So for you selfishness is publicly excused as pragmatism?”

“Each of us has a relationship to capitalism and pragmatism pays the rent. In your situation, where you are pushed outside of the ring, you don’t even have the choice to cooperate. For you, for your regime and for your people, pragmatism is not an option.”

“And was it pragmatism that led you to organize the infiltration of the student movements I later joined or the labour movement my friends organized? Was it your pragmatism that successfully placed spies in all the organizations that opposed the cynical old son of a bitch we called a dictator in our country but whom you and your imperial allies befriended because he was your son of a bitch? And is it not true that some of those people you placed, especially the less important ones in the student movement, did not they report to your office? And through that to our enemies? And was it pragmatism that led eventually to the arrest of activists, arrests that led to the imprisonment and exile of many truly honest and committed people? And was it also pragmatism that created the trumped up charges and rigged hearings that convicted them? And was it this pragmatism that led, in my own case, to years in jail and then exile – and eventually to my excommunication from a Church I love, that was my very life? Did you do that? Was all this the consequence of your pragmatism? Did you perpetrate such things to pay your rent?”

“I did what was required of me…”

“The defence of an officer in a death camp. I was acting under orders … … and doing a little on the side, making a small fortune from the market in gold teeth.” The young man’s scorn quickened the words to a tirade, the silence they demanded deep and uncomfortable. A politician who ought to have employed circumspection had lost control. A writer with a command of words had been cornered, rendered speechless and left without defence.

The president stood again at the window. He again retrieved the papers from his inside pocket and began to read. The old man, now looking every one of his eighty years, took the four steps needed to be at the other’s side. Over ignored papers and smouldering cigarette, their joint gaze again fell on the smartly dressed right wing thugs in the street below. “We know what we oppose,” said the president.

“At least today,” said the old writer.

There was a knock on the door, a sharp single perfunctory tap that signalled immediate entry. It was the old writer’s turn to speak to the assembled rally. Again, as he turned, he offered a back-turned left hand, a slight grasp of the other’s upper arm a gesture of solidarity. But this time the words were without passion, without animation and perhaps more sincere for their whisper.  “No pasaran. I’m with you.”

“Today,” repeated the other quickly, the slight pause obviously inserted as a prelude to continuation, “and every day I have found your work inspirational.”

The old man smiled a little and gripped again.