Shakespeare by Bill Bryson

At the start of Shakespeare Bill Bryson apologises for the fact that there is not much to tell. Every aspect of the bard’s physical presence on the planet seems to be shrouded in doubt and mystery. We don’t even know what he looked like. We don’t know much about where he lived, or what he did with his time, apart from write and act. And, though we think we know a reasonable amount about what Will wrote, we know next to nothing about how his works were performed, alongside zero about what role the writer, himself, performed.

So, having apologised for presenting a non-book with a non-story, Bill Bryson proceeds to fill two hundred pages with pure, unadulterated delight. The text provides context, detail and background. It is less than adulatory on the surface, apparently determined to stay within the bounds of the known and the probable. But when Bill Bryson does offer opinion, he reveals a clear and deeply felt love and admiration, almost worship, for his subject.

The book is an absolute joy from beginning to end. Perhaps there really aren’t any new facts or figures to discover, but Bill Bryson’s account of Shakespeare’s life has enough detail, biographical, critical and contextual, to offer as rounded a picture of the writer as we are likely to get. There are numerous Bryson humorous asides, of course, and these only add to the clarity of the piece.

In this slim work, Bryson offers a potted biography, snippets of literary criticism, some illuminating linguistics, much associated history - both of the era and the scholarship, and even a quick guided tour of the pretenders to the myth.

By the end the reader can only marvel at how much an assumed bedrock of national culture and identity could have been laid down by the sedimentation of so little material. But then, of course, there’s the works, which speak for themselves.

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Shakespeare: The World as a Stage (Eminent Lives)

Midnight All Day by Hanif Kureishi

Midnight All Day is a collection of short stories by Hanif Kureishi, an author whose characters often approach the low life, usually without ever actually attaining it. These stories are of variable quality, ranging from excellent to rather mundane, though they are all eminently readable, well written and well constructed. 

Sometimes, however, there’s just a bit too much incestuous involvement with the media. There are just a few too many writers, actors, television and film people around. One can understand why the author might meet a number of such people, but repeated use of media settings does occasionally detract from his story telling.

Despite this criticism, the characters are acutely drawn, interesting, engaging and are utterly credible. They tend to stumble or shamble through their lives from one opportunity to the next mistake, initiating and terminating relationships. 

Despite their tendency to write about or enact other characters, they often display very little facility for introspection. They often resort to their bottles or recreational drugs and treat sex as if it were a challenge. So the stories deal with late twentieth century British professional middle classes, whose careers are always on top until they are bust, whose fortunes are always up until they crash, and whose relationships are always idyllic until they are failed. 

Hanif Kureishi has a keen eye for the character of eighties and nineties Britain and on several occasions one feels implicitly that his subjects would not dream of discussing their woes with their parents. They are a generation apart, convinced by the illusion that they are special, that they live in a new era that owes nothing to any past. They are confident yet vulnerable, assertive yet indecisive, committed yet utterly ephemeral. 

There are occasions when these characteristics are a little overstated, but overall this is a moving and memorable collection which is probably best read one story at a time, rather than cover to cover. 

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The Leningrad Symphony – a personal interpretation of the Symphony No.7 Op.60 Dmitri Shostakovich

Like much music of quality, the Seventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Leningrad, is either loved or hated, rather than tolerated. It is famous, or infamous, depending on your point of view, for its first movement, a unique statement in the history of music, a movement lasting just under half of the symphony’s massive eighty minutes. It is also music, I believe, that is uniquely misunderstood, the popular interpretation being far too naïve an analysis of the motives of a composer as unpredictably and alternatively complex and trite as Shostakovich. So this is my personal version. First the description. I apologise if you already know the piece.

The piece opens with a confident, harmonically complex theme which seems to pass from one place to another, from one orchestral section to another like question, answer and analysis. It seems to portray life lived ordinarily, but tangibly celebrating the sophistication and tolerance of negotiated social contact. There is conflict here, but resolution is at hand through thought, interaction and experience. The music seems to offer a sense of life lived in the unending complexity of community.

But then the movement’s often derided second section begins. Over the “bolero-like” insistence of a repeated drum rhythm, an apparently innocuous, vaguely brainless, almost pop music joke theme strikes up, quietly at first, almost as if apologising for its own banality. The theme is repeated alongside an associated answering and balancing motif from the same mould. But it keeps getting louder and more assertive until eventually it transforms into a menacing presence that threatens violence. At its climax, the theme becomes a series of explosions which obviously refer to conflict and war. The complex theme of the opening returns to compete and the music fights out an exhausted resolution where the original sophisticated theme triumphs, but in an exhausted, empty way whilst the trite naivety of the drum rhythm reminds us that banality is not completely defeated.

The movement is often presented as entirely programmatic, as if it were film music. The complex themes at the start are the good people of Leningrad going about their daily lives, hence the sense of sophistication, an interpretation arising from a singularly patriotic interpretation of the work. The repeated intensity of the pop-like trivial tune is often described as the advancing German army. It begins quietly because it’s in the distance and gets louder as it approaches. On its arrival in Leningrad conflict is inevitable and, yes, the good people of Leningrad prevail, but achieve only an exhausted victory from which they can never recreate their original sophistication.

Now I have a problem with this view of the work, largely because, if it is accepted, the other movements make little sense. It is true that Shostakovich might have originally composed the first movement as a free-standing work and only added the other movements as an afterthought. It is also true that he himself summarised the symphony’s movements as War, Recollection, My Homeland and Victory, but I think that, as ever, the constraints that Stalinism placed on opinion rendered the composer more reticent than he might have chosen to be. I do think that the Leningrad’s first movement is programmatic, but I contend that its subject matter is ideology and that its intention could even be essentially propagandist, rather than patriotic. The fact that it does not believe its own propaganda, or indeed slants it in a way that might have caused displeasure to officialdom is the crucial element in my argument, because then the other three movements become nothing less than essential as attempts to answer the charges, to answer the questions.

Yes, the harmonic complexity of the opening theme must remain a depiction of the happy, sophisticated citizens of Leningrad going about their negotiated lives. But it’s a picture of the social interaction, an idealised socialism. It’s a portrait of what happy, democratised Soviets ought to be. The naïve repeated theme that follows is no German army, however. It is a musical depiction of the very concept of fascism. As with Nazism, itself, it begins small, almost unnoticed, its voice hardly heard. It is almost self-deprecatory in recognising the stupidity, the utter inanity of its own content, thus reflecting concepts such as nationalism, racism and other essential elements of such no-brain politics. But what can you do with a stupid message except repeat it? You can’t develop something that begins inane and stays that way. But you can repeat it and hope that it attracts the intellectually like-minded, the idiot, who will espouse its brainless simplicity because of the ease with which something without either content or rigour can be believed. And voices of support are added, slowly at first, but added nevertheless, and that’s why everything gets louder. And it doesn’t change because, having neither debate nor sophistication, it can’t change. It just asserts its own nonsense and inanity more forcefully. But now it is dangerous, largely because it has mobilised support amongst those who want to follow it blindly. So the repeated theme is the ideology of fascism and its triumph is the overbearing assertion of its own crassness. Its graduation to assertion beyond its own borders and thus to conflict is inevitable.

But in the end, of course, it fails, because once motivated the democratic, sophisticated, analytical ideology of the Soviet citizens of Leningrad will prevail. So the entire movement is an ideological conflict between fascism and Soviet socialism, with the latter, albeit exhausted, eventually victorious, despite the nagging continued presence of the former at the end of the movement. So that’s that. Or is it?

It is my suggestion that Dmitri Shostakovich did not believe this, at least on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That’s why we need the other three movements. The second is thematically related to the opening of the first, but the music is almost exhausted, bereft of the sophisticated energy of the beginning. Is this where we finished after the “war”, or in fact was it a different view of where we started – not so confident, not so sophisticated, just worn down? If so, then this movement is a different way of looking at the ideological propaganda of the first movement, for propaganda was what it was.

The third movement is again thematically related, but everything is slowed down. The sonorities are those of the Russian Orthodox Church in places. Its obvious nostalgia again harks back to a state and time where we idealised our past, but where that past might even have attained the ideal. We are separated from it now, and its utopia can only be imagined or perhaps worshipped.

The fourth movement now becomes the ideological key to the entire work. Yes, it is triumphant. Yes, it asserts and reaffirms an ultimate victory, but its climaxes are grand rather than heartfelt. It finds its expression via the musical platitudes that Shostakovich made his hallmark. So, yes, we have prevailed. Yes, we have also won. We have defeated the ideology of fascism manifest as enemy, as depicted in the propaganda of the first movement. But what we have achieved is neither the sophistication we claimed at the outset nor its idealised memory from some imagined past. The opening theme is there at the end, but it has lost all confidence in itself. There is a hollowness about the success, a questioning about which side of the overall ideological conflict actually prevailed. So when the great patriotic symphony that in some estimations celebrates victory in the Great Patriotic War ends triumphantly, it is not just exhausted but also disillusioned because the naivety of the outcome bears considerable resemblance to what we originally opposed. Now that’s sophisticated.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Orchestral concert by Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra, La Vila Joiosa, 9 January 2008

To live in a Mediterranean climate with year-round access to the sea, good food and wine, plus magnificent scenery would be enough. To have access to three symphony orchestra venues within ten kilometres of the front door is a priceless bonus. The Palau in Altea is long established, whilst the Auditori Mediterrania in La Nucia is entering its second year. But this week we have the inaugural concert series of the Teatre Auditori de La Vila Joiosa, in whose steeply-raked, red, black and white surroundings the Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra played last night, 9 January 2008. 

Under their supremely gifted director, Josep Vicent, the orchestra, resident in Communidad Valenciana since 2005, offered five twentieth century orchestral works. As ever, the programme was beautifully and expertly played by this excellent band and, once again, Josep Vicent’s choice of content was outstanding, his conducting masterful. 

The evening began with Short Ride on a Fast Machine by John Adams. It is a miniature concerto for orchestra, played against an insistent percussion beat. For me the piece is a parody, an update of Arthur Honnegger’s Pacific 231, a piece with which it shares significant structural similarities. In the 1920s, the cutting edge of Honnegger’s musical depiction of speed was the railway engine. For John Adams in the 1980s it was a motorbike. It is uncanny how both pieces change rhythm half way through, both restating their pulse through the low brass of tuba and trombone. Adams’s motorcycle is less heavily engineered than Honnegger’s railway engine, however, and is definitely a lot quicker off the mark. 

Josep Vicent’s second choice was Ravel’s La Valse, a piece I find thoroughly surreal. In theory, it’s an extended waltz for orchestra, but in places the music and its dance rhythms are so stretched and pulled out of shape as to render the effect brooding, even threatening. When the waltz theme emerges relatively intact, it seems super-real, almost over-stated and thus incongruous. Ravel’s masterly orchestration provides surprises and arresting juxtapositions of sonority. The Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra was able to show off its admirable ensemble and individual virtuosity throughout this strange, strange piece. 

The concert’s first half concluded with a performance of Ravel’s G major piano concerto, with Canaries-born Iván Martin as soloist. I would dearly love to write more of the orchestra’s superb playing of this deceptive piece, but not to give complete prominence to Iván Martin‘s playing would be criminal. He made the solo part sound effortless, kept a wonderful pace and was perfection indeed across the rhythmic syncopations. But he was especially convincing in the slow movement, when the piano plays throughout. It all sounds deceptively simple, and too often the movement is presented as sentimental or comes across as a platitude. Not so in this performance, when it was sincere, elegant, dignified and not a little noble. Again Ravel is deceptive, offering polyrhythms and occasional conflicts of keys within an overall impression of lightness and jazz. 

Pursuing what was now emerging as a theme, the second half began with another work that presented popular idiom in a challenging way. This time it was Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. The Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra grew to gargantuan size for this piece, with a veritable battery of percussion, plus obligato finger snapping. But the piece is tough beyond the imagination of a listener who knows only the musical’s famous tunes. It’s a real orchestral tour de force and was a triumph of the player’s virtuosity. 

The evening’s final piece was again a virtuosic, tough-edged celebration of popular idiom. Manuel de Falla’s suite from his ballet, The Three Cornered Hat, owes much to the flamenco of his native Andalusia. It has many spectacular moments where the music speeds and slows with the bravura of a macho showman dancer. And so the concert moved accelerando towards its thunderous conclusion, a racket matched only by the enthusiasm of the applause. And, by the way, the area is likely to have another concert hall in a year or so. Plus, if you missed the concert in La Vila, it’s repeated next week in La Nucia. I shall be attending for a repeat performance. Artistry of this quality cannot be missed.

The Partnership by Barry Unsworth

The Partnership was Barry Unsworth’s first novel and feels rather different in both style and content from most of his other books. It deals with a business arrangement, and therefore relationship of sorts between Foley and Moss. They design and manufacture plaster pixies for the tourist trade in a Cornish seaside village. There’s a division of labour between them and as the book progresses, divisions of other sorts emerge as well.

There’s a hint of Under Milk Wood about the setting, though there’s no attempt at poetry. What we do have, however, is a portrayal of a small community that is impinged upon by outsiders and their ideas. Not that all of the characters were born and bred Cornish. They weren’t, and so to some extent the book covers some similar ground to Julian Barnes’s England England. But it is both more and less than this.

The Partnership is about the psychology and the mechanics of the relationship between Moss and Foley. Quite different in personality as well as other highly significant traits, they cooperate to achieve a common goal. Perhaps like any relationship, their pragmatic business arrangement succeeds while its boundaries are defined and agreed. Its success is limited, however, and both yearn for something else. What they individually desire leads eventually to their becoming incompatible, however.

The Partnership is a must for someone like me who is a confirmed addict of Barry Unsworth’s work, but it is definitely not a place to start. Some of the issues the book deals with have dated, as have the ways in which they are treated. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, once I had come to terms with its limitations.

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The Partnership

In our grasp - How new technology is about to democratise publishing

Speech to Libros International Christmas Lunch, December 2007 

In our grasp

My name is Philip Spires and I am a Libros International author. It’s about six months since I first held a copy of my book, Mission, in my grasp. Mission was a project I had lived with, on and off, for twenty years. I wrote the book in the 1980s and forgot about it until November 2006. I retrieved it, decided to finish it and then there was Libros International. 

So, in my grasp, there was the book. It was a strange feeling. It felt like it had a life of its own, as if it had nothing to do with me any more. I am proud of Mission. It’s not autobiographical, but many of the events in the book did happen. But, of course, I re-ordered them, changed them, made them fit the overall idea that I decided would underpin the book. I would not be so crass, so clichéd, as to say that it is “based on real events”, but I would claim that Mission contains a lot that derives from my personal experience. The book is my way of communicating that experience, hopefully in a way that goes beyond merely listing a series of events. 

There’s meaning there, somewhere – at least I hope there is. Writing, obviously, is a form of communication. Creative writing is personal communication. It offers a particular, yes, a personal view of existence. When we write, we claim that we are special, that we have something special to say. There would be no point in doing it, otherwise. So what might I be able to communicate? What is so special about me that might motivate others to read about the experiences I relate? Who is this “Philip Spires”, resplendent on the cover of the book? 

Well, I was born in 1952, so that makes me 55 years old. I was brought up in what was then a mining village in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The home we lived in had no garden. You walked directly from the front room onto a main road. We spread cinders from the fire across the back yard to fill out the puddles. My mother had to go out and lift up the washing line with a prop to let the coal wagon through. We had an outside toilet with torn up newspaper on a nail. We had no bathroom, and running water only in the kitchen sink. Baths were taken once a week in a galvanised tub set in front of the kitchen fire. The cellar used to flood and I spent many hours sailing the tin bath in that subterranean sea. Tell ‘em that you lived in a shoe box in the middle of the road and do they believe you? No. But it turned out that I was quite good at school.

I was accelerated. I did my eleven plus at nine and went to Normanton Grammar School. From there I won a scholarship to Imperial College in London where I studied Chemical Engineering. Yes, I am a mathematician and a physicist. End of conversation… But I didn’t want to design oil refineries, so I trained as a teacher. I have always been conscious that I am a product of the 1944 Education Act. Had that legislation not sought to widen access to education then I would probably have become an electrician like my father or gone down the pit like my grandfather. For me the 1944 Education Act changed everything. 

So I went to university. I was always conscious of this opportunity that had never been available to previous generations of my family. That’s why I decided to teach. I wanted to help other poor people to empower themselves, as I thought I had done. And then I went to Kenya. I did two years as a volunteer in a self-help secondary school in Kitui District, eastern Kenya. I became a head teacher after just three months and so, as a 22 year old, I found myself running a school with 180 students, 120 of which were full-time boarders. I had six full-time teaching staff and five ancillary staff. I had to construct a science lab, library, kitchen, dining room, two teacher’s houses and a large concrete water tank. I did all the school accounts, extracted fees from the students, paid the staff, handled governors’ and parents’ meetings in Swahili etc. It was quite an experience. Things that happened in those two years formed the basis of Mission and, indeed, A Fool’s Knot, my next book awaiting publication by Libros International. 

It’s thirty years since I wrote A Fool’s Knot, incidentally, though I revised it this year having retrieved my original hand-written manuscript after 15 years of separation. Ten years ago I threw away the two copies of the book that I had typed. At the time I needed to offload luggage. And now it will be published.

After Kenya, I went back to London where I met Caroline. We married and lived and worked in London for 16 years. I taught in schools and colleges and was involved in some very interesting spare time projects. Then, in 1992 we upped and went to Brunei in South-East Asia. We lived there for six and a half years and then moved to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates for three years. 

Then we gravitated here to Spain, and have been here for five years. I have taught mathematics and information technology throughout, but I have also studied. I have a Master’s degree in education and a PhD in social sciences, specialising in the psychological aspects of economic change. 

So here I am, a maths teacher who does computers, grounded in educational theory and a specialist in how economic change impacts the individual’s identity, beliefs and culture. Perhaps I am unique, but then we all are, because we are all individuals and have an individual and thus individualised experience. A pause here to say thank you and for being patient while I talked about “me”. But what’s the point? How does this come together? 

Well let’s start with the 1944 Education Act. And let’s remember that it’s only 150 years or so since economically developed countries actively tried to widen access to education. Prior to that it was a controlled, utterly exclusive path, open to only a miniscule fraction of the population. It is still true that 95% of all scientists who have ever lived are alive today. This statistic is a direct consequence of a deliberate global widening of access to education in the last century, which itself has led to an amazing flowering of knowledge and discovery. 

Human population and life expectancy have soared. In Brunei, for instance, life expectancy rose from 40 to 80 years in one generation. Yes, “progress” results in environmental pressures, social tensions, conflict, perhaps, but personally I would not want to return to a life expectancy of 40, and neither would I volunteer to forego the technology that so enhances the quality of my life. Our ingenuity got us here. It will take us somewhere else as well. 

But if that ingenuity is not literally “schooled”, not presented with opportunity to develop and express itself, then it will be wasted, never realised. So it is my assertion that all of this human transformation, most of which is positive, came about primarily as a result of wider access to education. I am also a social scientist. If physical sciences observe natural phenomena with a view to categorising them and extracting patterns of predictability and behaviour, then social sciences do the same with groups of people. It’s harder to categorise in the social sciences because the targets keep moving. Societies tend to change before they have defined themselves, certainly before they have succumbed to description, let alone analysis. 

The mechanisms of the physical world are relatively constant, if stubbornly hard to reveal, whereas those of the human world are a seething pot of bubbles. There’s an approach to social sciences called phenomenology. What it uses for data is individual experience. I’ve done a bit myself. It takes many hours of work to conduct interviews, transcribe them, analyse them and then reflect upon the content. When, as a researcher, you try to contrast the phenomenological data provided by people here and now with that of the past, you quickly realise that there really isn’t anything to work with. 

If access to education only increased a hundred or so years ago, access to the means of recording individual human existence really has never widened. It remains restricted, access to it controlled in the way that education used to be the privilege of the few. If you want to communicate your own personal and particular experience, you write something. Speech is both free and common, but it’s ethereal: once spoken it’s gone for ever. Until the end of the twentieth century, individuals who wanted to record experience first had to secure access to education to learn literacy. They then had to have enough time off from securing the necessities of life to write. 

And finally they would be presented with the highly unlikely task of finding a publisher, someone who was willing to invest money in the production of a record of that highly personal experience. Interesting it may be. Marketable it generally was not. In addition, the publisher doing the paying usually demanded the call of the writer’s tune, so the individual part of that individual experience was generally dropped as the publisher inserted his own requirements. 

But where are we now? New technology means that we can produce books with little investment. The print-on-demand technique currently produces relatively expensive books, but that will soon change. Electronic self-publishing can be free. The blogosphere is something entirely new. And, as a consequence, for the first time in human history, the voices of ordinary people, living ordinary lives, having ordinary experiences can be heard. The word ordinary, by the way, is illusory. What we really should say is “particular”, “individual”, “different”, or “interesting”. 

Currently there is no phenomenological human history. It does not exist. We are witnessing its birth. Imagine a hundred years from now being able to say that 95% of all the authors who have ever lived are currently alive – and all because of changes in technology at the end of the twentieth century, allied with the initiative of a few visionaries at the time who saw the potential. So thank you to all five of the founding partners of Libros International, the author’s publisher, for being prime movers in a revolution, a revolution to make the voice of the ordinary, the particular, the unique individual heard. Thanks to you, it’s now in our grasp.

Masterpiece: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

The fly cover of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan describes the book as “a short novel of remarkable depth by a writer at the height of his powers”. On Chesil Beach was recently short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, but lost out to Anne Enright’s The Gathering. I have read both books and, for me at least, what is so amazing is the mere fact that two such utterly different concepts could have been considered for the same prize. It is reassuringly astounding that the “genre” of literary fiction can be home to every style, every emotion, every approach, every outcome, everything imaginable and much that is real. 

Those who write book blurbs are often prone to hyperbole. The greatest, the best, the most, the biggest, the most superlative are terms of mundane commonplace. The term “best selling” is usually an empty platitude. “Real” often signifies “very”, but without the latter’s imagined meaning. 

So what can we make of “a short novel of remarkable depth by a writer at the height of his powers”? In the case of On Chesil Beach this blurb is an understatement, but it is essentially accurate and justified. If I were to write a blurb for this Ian McEwan novel, I would use a single word: masterpiece. I will offer only the merest summary of the plot to provide context, because the book effectively deals with just one event, a newlywed couple’s wedding night. What happens to them is the book’s crucial point, so to reveal it would render the reading less rewarding. 

Suffice it to say that Edward and Florence are newlyweds and they are in a Dorset hotel for their honeymoon. This is the early 1960s, an era when sexuality was not discussed or even approached in the manner of even half a decade later. Edward and Florence are products of their age and of their upbringing. Ian McEwan tells us much of these aspects of their characters in asides and cameos throughout the narrative. 

When I reviewed the same writer’s Saturday, I described the book as time turned inside out. In that book, across the span of a single day, an entire family is presented through its past, its aspirations, its identities. On Chesil Beach accomplishes a similar feat across a smaller canvas, but in a much more concentrated form, replete with comment, detail, analysis and observation. Florence is solidly middle class, Edward less so. She is a violinist from a musical family. He likes Chuck Berry. They are deeply in love and they marry, but they remain children of their age, and there is the rationale for the book, an examination of their private ideas on how to cope with adulthood, alongside an account of the practicalities. 

On Chesil Beach has limited objectives, lives mainly in the events of a single evening, but, like Saturday, turn its time inside out, so we have beautifully detailed pictures of both of the nuptials’ families. Coping, or not, is what characterised the age. On Chesil Beach is a masterpiece, beautifully conceived and executed. Do read it. 

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