Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

When reading history, it's always instructive and insightful to step back and consider the “big picture”. Detail, though essential, indeed the very stuff of any understanding of history, can sometimes weave a web of obscurity and confusion around the obvious. The big picture, then, allows a reader to prioritize, to contextualize and to rationalize. What, then, might we make of a book which presents hardly any detail, but just a swift sketch of a big picture? Indeed, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari presents a picture of history so big it purports to be nothing less than a birth to death biography of homo sapiens, the current and dominant human species, in case you have yet to meet one.

From evolutionary beginnings through the establishment of our genetic identity, Yuval Noah Harari charts of the human tendency to form social groups, use tools and language, while sustaining ourselves by hunting and gathering. We exit Africa – somehow, probably thanks to assistance from contemporary climate change - and eventually become established across the planet. Via our Cognitive Revolution we developed our early skills and became rather good at most things we tried to do. Perhaps two good.

Success, perhaps, led to an Agricultural Revolution, where suddenly property became a concept. We domesticated animals, selectively bred yield into crops and docility into beasts of burden. We also succumbed to other new concepts such as epidemics. Note here that an unknown number of millennia intervened between stage one, the Cognitive, and stage two, the Agricultural. Writing also intervened at some point, but probably only after we invented property, for only then did we start to train accountants.

Agriculture, this new mode of production, effectively unified the human race, however. It was so successful that it spread to wherever humans ventured, and progressively this had become the entire planet. But this relatively sedentary lifestyles and the emerging possibility of control of economic resources led to the establishment of towns and villages, empires, armies, castles and probably soft furnishings.

And then there was Science and human kind’s increased ability to predict or control the physical world beyond the lifecycles of plants or docile servant beasts. Beginning barely 300 years ago, this latest, current and possibly last human revolution is still with us. It led to the invention of countless previously non-existent concepts, such as capitalism and socialism, mass consumption and ideological veganism, exponentially increased energy consumption, a Green Revolution that perhaps laid waste, genetic engineering, the internet, artificial intelligence and breakfast cereals.

Throughout, Yuval Noah Harari identifies identifies the human need to create myth. And this has real purpose in our race’s modus vivendi. Without myths called religion, human beings would never have been able to conquer the genetic necessity of individual competition. We would not have become urbanized or cooperated to solve the complex tasks that exploiting our planet requires. Harari’s grouping together of all such mythical motivation – and thereby his dismissal of its representing anything approaching the concept of truth – might have led to the book and the author falling foul of certain authorities across the globe, if past experience is anything to trust. Perhaps this also tells us something about what kinds of book the committed religious don’t read.

Thus through the 400 pages or so of Sapiens we can relive the entire history of the human race and travel centuries into its speculated future. Though it is easy to sound flippant about a book that presents itself almost as a biography of homo sapiens, there is hardly a page of the work that is not stimulating, informative or even surprising, all at the same time. Such broad pictures are perhaps easy to write, especially if they are in accurate or polemical. But that when they are well researched, lucidly written, accurate, insightful and thought-provoking, their construction of a big picture really does help us to understand and contextualize the details of history which otherwise may not constitute joined-up thinking. Sapiens is a thought-provoking and challenging work, claiming to be A Brief History of Mankind. By the end we are eager for more, but also not convinced there will be much more to write.

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.

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

The Long Take by Robin Robertson is a novel. As its title implies, it owes much to film and is conceived as a series of cinematic scenes set in the late 1940s and early 1950s. They alternate between New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco and follow the progress of Walker, who is trying to earn a living, survive and become a journalist. The scenes are arranged chronologically, but there is no attempt by the author to link them as a narrative. They thus present the reader almost with glanced insights to a life which is largely lived elsewhere, within the principal character’s experience, which we only ever fee we partially share.

On the face of it, Walker appears to be a rather conventional young man. He does not seem to be particularly ambitious. He is not assertive, and rarely takes the lead. He is not driven by urges to succeed, dominate or enrich himself. But he does not seem to form relationships easily, though neither does he obviously shun them. There always seems to be something in the way.

He does become interested in the personal histories of down-and-outs who sleep rough on the streets of the cities he inhabits. He is interested in them as individuals, concerned to know where they come from, and how they managed to finish up poor and destitute. He does find some common threads, and these form an essential element of the book’s plot.

Walker himself is a veteran of the final battles of World War II. He participated in the D-day landings and suffers regular flashbacks to the experience of being on a Normandy beach without cover and being shot at. He lost many comrades in battle and seems constantly to ask what gave him the right to survive. Perhaps this enduring trauma of war is what repeatedly denies him the self-confidence, self-awareness or perhaps ambition to participate in life, except as an almost detached observer. It is also the aspect of life that denies him a means to share the lives of those around him. He seems cocooned in a past that haunts him and controls the way he relates to others.

I have deliberately chosen not to mention The Long Take’s most obvious characteristic before describing its content, because questions of form can often dominate when they do not deserve to take pride of place. But now it is time to state that Robin Robertson’s novel, The Long Take, is written in verse, and this makes it rather unusual. Now as with all verse, the act of reading it is a rather different experience from reading prose. There is a necessary and inevitable need to pause, to absorb words, to observe lines and to identify the flow of rhythm. And it is via this use of verse that the author also more finally tunes the reader’s moments of complete concentration on and dedication to the text. What works extremely well in this scenario is the focus on the details of Walker’s experience, both in his current life and on those beaches during wartime, whose memories endure. The Long Take often tingles with a reality that can also sting. Walker’s regular flashbacks are also indicated typographically, appearing in italics to give them the stress that the reader thereafter subconsciously assumes.

What does not work well is the characterization associated with the books protagonists. If this were a film, then most characters other than Walker would probably appear rather as no more than cameos. But this is a small criticism, because the enhanced emotion offered by the verse more than compensates for any lack of descriptive context. The Long Take cannot be read quickly. It's a verse form demands the reader’s concentration and commitment. It is, however, a rewarding experience and eventually an intensely moving book, describing lives destroyed by the continued experience, as well as the historical reality and unseen consequences of war.

Milkman by Anna Burns

Milkman is a novel by Anna Burns. It won the Booker. It is a book. It's a book about a place, a place which is not named, but we know where it is because its divisions, borders, red lines, call them what you may, are currency in its social divide and international renown. It's a place that's part of somewhere else, or isn't, depending on your view of history, even though it's the present, its present that is the only relevant place to inhabit. There is another place over the border, and, yes, another one over the water, but in the past those from over there have often been this side of the ditch to leave their marks and then go home again, or not, which is at the root of the problems of this place with its border, its division, its divides, this side of the water. Like anywhere, there are people throughout to this place, but, unlike almost everywhere, they very rarely have names, or if they have them, they don’t want to use them, believing, clearly, that the name would incriminate, accuse, label, even identify in this situation where to be known always carries risks. If you are Milkman, or even a milkman, you can live with the label, possibly because it strikes fear into those who hear it, fear of association, or of reprisal, or of identification, or even of not getting your pinta. That's what the capital letter can do, or undo, if you don't have one, just one, at the start, making one a name and the other, well, a name, but not a name to identify, only a name to label. But then there are lots of labels this side of the water. There are labels above all others, which might determine where you live, might reveal what you believe, might dictate where you might walk, and where you might not, where you might drink, or buy chips, where the rest of the shop snubs you and you might even forget to pay, for your chips, of course, for you are always likely to pay, eventually, in other ways. It's these labels that make you walk faster through the ten-minute zone that divides the divisions, the road where you are being watched, counted, logged, photographed, recorded, identified as identifiable, in the future as well as in the present, which itself will become a permanent past if your name, still unspoken, receives the celebrity of appearing on someone’s file. Unless, of course, you are that Somebody McSomebody who is already known, already logged, already identified, probably already filed, in which case that Somebody McSomebody would probably not want to be seen, not want to venture into that ten-minute no-somebody's land, not anybody's land, that works like the border between over there and over here or the ditch between over here and over the water, keeping apart, keeping division. Unless, of course you are family, in which case you are known as brother or sister and by number, first, second, third etc., or you are known intergenerationally, like mama or papa or granddad, who might even still have a name, like one of your brothers, which is better not said in any case, being that it would be recognized, labelled, identified or merely chiseled into a headstone. That's always the risk, especially when your family is known to be sympathetic to causes unspoken in private but inevitably adopted in public, because the photographs, the records, the files prove you still live over there, on that side of the ten-minute zone that marks the division. And, when you have decided who you are or who you might become, should you agree to continue to see a milkman or other for the purpose of something other than acquiring milk, then you need to watch your back to make sure your maybe-boyfriend is not watching you while you are at your deception, which is not deception, because you're not trying to deceive. And then, in the end, you are at the end of the book, which is not really a book, but a train of thoughts, events, thoughts about events, and analyses, rationalizations of the irrational, all inside the head of an eighteen-year-old woman, who happens to come from one side or other of the divide, in the divided land, that's one side of the border and another side of the water ditch that separates it from over there. You have travelled the roads, lived the short lives, felt the threats, been taken to all the places the eighteen-year-old has deemed you will see, felt the confusion life has brought to her life, and experienced the lack of ending that inevitably applies to things that have no end. The only certainty, and this at least is certain, that this book, that actually might not be a book, but thought, experience and imagination, is a worthy Booker and arguably one of the greatest achievements in the history of things that generally are called books.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Sex on the Beach – sculptures by Antoni Miró in Altea

Two years ago, artist Antoni Miró exhibited a series of sculptures around Valencia’s old port district. Opinion at the time was divided about his work, with some convinced that these images in bronze outline were just too risqué for public view. Further south, on the Costa Blanca, almost all seafront bars offer a cocktail called Sex On The Beach, so surely these works can find a home among Altea’s beach promenade!

Antoni Miró is a prolific artist. He is based in a small town near Alcoi, inland from Alicante in Spain’s Communidad Valenciana. He works mainly at night and incessantly. He paints. He sculpts. He works on canvas, in ceramic, metal and with found objects. He works with computer graphics, and often mixes techniques and media in a single work. He produces images which often include contemporary themes, political ideas, social issues, images from film, history, conflict, popular culture, daily life and anything else that catches his eye. But these images are often transformed by colour, choice of media or context, often by simple juxtaposition, so the message is transformed, amplified and thus communicated in an intellectually challenging way, and always visually arresting.

These particular works on display in Altea are bronze sculptures. In some ways they are a set of positive and negative images because of the way they have been conceived and created. A simple way to visualize this idea is to imagine a sheet of paper having an image cut out. Then imagine working at the cut-out to add more detail. Next display the cut-out next to the original sheet which, of course, has a space the same shape as the image. Now repeat with a large bronze plate. Good luck.

And so for each positive cut-out shape, there is also a negative, rectangular sheet outlining the shaped space. The effect is doubly interesting. The positive images have detail incised, so they reveal something of their setting through themselves. The negatives, obviously, provide an image-shaped experience of their setting, an image-shaped window opening onto the environment that contains them. The results are captivating.

But what caused the divided opinions in Valencia was the works’ subject matter. For this Antoni Miró turned to images he found illustrated on ancient Greek pottery, and some of these are highly erotic. Hence my title, Sex on the Beach. The artist, meanwhile, likes to remind everyone that these images are based on originals that are 2,500 years old. In many respects, human beings possibly have not changed much in that time, and that may be the point. Indeed, some of the sculptures have been damaged by vandals. It seems that some people in Altea objected to the content of these images, an opinion that automatically endowed a few of those same individuals with the right to mangle some of the work. Lists of cocktails were not attacked, apparently. 

But there is much more to Antoni Miró’s work than mere controversy.  Works in other locations throughout the town illustrate the breadth of this artist’s vision. In the space in front of the Palau Altea, the town’s impressive concert venue, there are other positive-negative bronzes inspired by the paintings of Magritte, that might equally be Stan Laurel. There is an immovable bicycle parked on a plinth, its handlebars transformed into a single wing-like shape that suggests flight, while nearby its negative outline pierces its bronze plate, affording a bicycle-shaped view of the University of Alicante’s Fine Arts Faculty behind, an image that in itself does not normally provoke violent reaction.

Antoni Miró’s art sits firmly in the melting pot of contemporary Spanish art, though he himself might prefer the label Catalan, or Valencian. It approaches photorealism at times, but is suffused with surrealism, the comment of Goya and the almost explosive still-life of the baroque. But it is also intellectually rigorous, thought-provoking and vivid, often so much so that it provokes reaction. And this reaction is not about the art’s abstraction, it is a rejection of its realism. Now there is something novel.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan won the Booker prize for 2014, an award that was probably deserved. Much has been made of the author’s a relationship with his father, who was a prisoner of war in southeast Asia when the Japanese were building their railroad to the north using forced labor. Approaching the book as a tale of this war time experience would be a mistake, however. The personal experience of the 1940s is most certainly there, but it is by no means the totality of the book.

On the contrary, The Narrow Road to the Deep North presents several lives in all their contemporary complexity. The style is varied, sometimes disturbingly disconnected.  Often there are short sentences delivered like punches, and then long passages that seem to meditate around the perimeters of their interest, perhaps without seeming to engage in content. But don't take any of this as criticism (except, of course, in the literary sense): it's merely an attempt at observation and description. When a reader approaches a book, it's often useful to know what not to expect.

A character who remain central to the novel is an individual called Dorrigo Evans. We follow his life, his loves and, to some extent, his profession. Married to Ella, he loves Amy. And, for Dorrigo Evans, it seems that however fleeting the thought, however inconsequential the encounter, it is destined to be remembered, to be recorded and then recalled when least considered, if, and only if, Dorrigo Evans chooses to do so. Thus, life seems to aggregate around these characters to create a shell of allusion, association and chance, mixed with a fixer of self.

The wartime experiences are indeed central, however. They are not a blow-by-blow account of conflict, nor of the confinement which ensues after capture. There is something of the day-to-day suffering via forced labor and deprivation that these men suffered, some in the extreme, but more important is the continual challenge of survival, the daily challenge of reaching tomorrow. How these men cope with their privatization is central to Richard Flanagan's approach. And by the end of their captivity, everyone involved remains forever changed, forever scarred by the experience. Except for the legion who died, of course, for perhaps they were by then beyond suffering.

It's not a one-sided account, by the way. Richard Flanagan attempts to enter the minds of the captors, the Japanese soldiers who are responsible for creating the conditions that impose suffering on the captives. The attempt is not totally convincing, but the story of the Korean guard, conscripted to do Japan's dirty work, with the same level of choice as the captives he helps to torture and who is eventually tried for war crimes, is one of the most successful, powerful and memorable aspects of her book. And then there is the amputation episode… Realism rears its features here, and they are vivid.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is not a novel that can be reviewed easily. It is complex, involved, subtle and involving. These are characters – particularly Dorrigo Evans – who seem utterly credible. We are interested in their lives, because they make mistakes, imagine themselves in the wrong while doing something right. This makes them as vulnerable as the real people they never quite become. But they get do on with it. The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan is a beautiful book.

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.