Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a compelling portrait of people on the downside of a dystopia. Like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or J G Ballard’s Kingdom Come, Never Let Me Go is built around an abhorrent aspect of social organisation. Crucially, in all three books, the focus of the subject matter is merely an extension of a facet of our own society. Fertility issues provide the material for The Handmaid’s Tale, while brainless consumerism fuelled Kingdom Come. Kazuo Ishiguro’s subject matter has a medical focus that provides an essentially more credible idea than either of the two other works mentioned. Eventually Ballard’s vision cannot be maintained by his scant material, whereas Margaret Atwood’s is strengthened by the credibility of its own downside, its own contradictions. Ishiguro’s story line is strong enough in itself to maintain interest, credibility and drama from start to finish. There is real humanity in this story.

The book begins in Hailsham, an obviously special school set in an idyllic corner of the English countryside. But this is clearly no ordinary education. We follow the fortunes of three of its students, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy. We see them grow up, make their fumbling transformation from childhood to adolescence and then embark upon the stuttering unpredictability of young adulthood. Hailsham’s students have to learn how to deal with their own shortcomings and how to manage their talents. They must cope with sometimes strained relations with their teachers, especially in the area of reconciling what they want to do versus what seems to be demanded of them, and thus what they are allowed to attempt. They become aware of sex and introduce themselves to its world in their own ways at different times, each of them reacting differently to their experience.

So what makes these people so special? Well, for a start they live protected lives. They never appear to need any money, nor possessions, for that matter, what little they do have being recycled ad infinitum via a system of almost formal barter. They seem to be protected from fashion, consumerism, family break-up, mass media and even street life. Surely there is something strange about them, despite their apparently normal physical, mental and psychological characteristics.

Not until about half way through the book does the reader start to fill in the blanks. But by the end the dreadful picture is complete, and rendered even more frightening by its complete credibility. To find out the nature of the plot, you will have to read the book, but, though I have stressed the importance of the overall concept’s contribution to the book’s success, it is not the subject matter that makes this a superb novel. It is the characterisation, the empathy that the reader develops with Kathy and Tommy and the sympathy that their tragedy eventually engenders. The context served to amplify these responses, not blur or confuse them. It is this quality that makes never Let Me Go a completely memorable and highly moving read.

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Never Let Me Go

A Walk Up Fifth Avenue by Bernard Levin

Bernard Levin begins A Walk Up Fifth Avenue with three quotations from descriptions of New York City. These date from 1916, 1929 and 1949 and were written by Jane Kilmer, Theodore Dreiser and E. B. White respectively. Bernard Levin uses these vignettes to establish the reality, or perhaps unreality of a changing city, a superficially permanent edifice which really is in constant flux and is never more than a transient manifestation made concrete of the people, interests and activities it houses.

Bernard Levin’s 1989 book now becomes, itself, another such historical exhibit, since the twenty years that have elapsed since the publication of A Walk Up Fifth Avenue has seen major changes to New York’s skyline, economy and population. In 1989 Bernard Levin made scant reference to Arabs or Afghans, and hardly mentions Islam when referring to the city’s religious identity. In 1989, Russians, generally, were still in Russia, not the United States. The twin towers of the World Trade Centre appear in three of the book’s colour plates without remark, and nowhere in the book’s three hundred pages it took to walk the length of Fifth Avenue is there a single mention of the word “terrorism”.

For the targeted British audience of this book, the author, perhaps, symbolised something quintessentially English. An established columnist on The Times, well-known television commentator and latterly presenter of off-beat travel programmes, Bernard Levin was close to being a household name at the time, an instantly recognisable voice amongst the middle classes. But he was, himself, of immigrant stock, a Jew, and, at least originally, very much on the edge of the British establishment, no doubt knocking regularly on the its partially closed doors. Maybe this is why, in A Walk Up Fifth Avenue, he deals so informatively with the concepts of “new” and “old” money in New York. He describes beautifully how shady might be the origins of any kind of money, but the obvious class differences that the distinction engenders is keenly felt and wonderfully depicted in the book. Bernard Levin however, reveals that he is no fan of luxury for luxury’s sake, and clearly has little sympathy for any kind of conspicuous consumption.

He rubs shoulders with the better heeled at a New York party, but gently satirises the ostentation and the bad taste, perhaps being guilty of applying a new-world versus old-world, peculiarly British pomposity to place himself above an old money versus new money snobbery. It makes a fascinating juxtaposition of the author’s opinion and subjects’ assumptions. What makes the passages even more poignant for British readers, of course, is the Bernard Levin’s long association with satire, especially that aimed at the rich and powerful.

Levin is also clearly not a fan of commercialism. The appearance of Ronald McDonald in a Fifth Avenue parade promoted Levin to describe the character, somewhat sardonically, as “a true hero of our time”. It prompts the reader to reflect that Father Christmas, as we know him today, is largely the product of an erstwhile promotional campaign for Coca Cola and his default red and white is not much more than a corporate trademark. And perhaps even the practice of giving presents on a day other than the Three Kings was an American invention, driven more by marketing than generosity. One wonders whether a century from now children will sit on a burger clown’s knee to receive their annual schooling in consumerism.

A Walk Up Fifth Avenue is much more than a travel book. It’s considerably less than a history, and never attempts analysis. It is an informative, slightly random mixture of whatever caught the fancy of an observant, vaguely jaundiced British journalist as he tried to probe the heart of one of the world’s greatest cities. It’s an uneven read, but doubly rewarding, since the book not only takes the reader there, it also now offers evidence of its own justification, because it catalogues change and invites us to reflect on our current, equally tenuous, impermanent status.

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Poisoned Petals by Andy Crabb

Poisoned Petals by Andy Crabb is a set of over forty short stories, tales with a Spanish flavour. Most are set in Spain, with many featuring locations and people from within the Costa Blanca, where the author lives, works and continually observes. Some are historical, others utterly contemporary, both in time and in content.

Property developers, estate agents and used car salesmen figure alongside more traditional Spanish figures, such as the bar owner, the peasant farmer and the land owner. Some stories feature characters from Spain’s Moorish period, and others pre-Visigoth, even pre-Roman Iberians.

It is surprising, therefore, to read in the highly informative author’s postscript that several of the pieces germinated elsewhere, in Britain and southern Africa, for instance. Some were transplanted items from newspaper stories, while others arose from museum visits, local tales or shared discussion with other writers.

But the stories grew in Andy Crabb’s fertile imagination and bloomed into a veritable display of skilful, entertaining writing. The fact that the author claims they eventually flowered into Poisoned Petals gives the reader a hint from the start that irony and twist will play their part.

Many of Andy Crabb’s stories deal with the sibling concepts of revenge and retribution. People are often “getting away with something”, getting one up on an innocent or unsuspecting victim. Driven to anger by such perfidious exploitation, these inherently gentler, law-abiding characters themselves become vengeful, calculating deceivers, until the score is decisively settled. In often morally satisfying conclusions, many of the original villains receive a comeuppance that is significantly sweeter than mere defeat, longer lasting than simple victory.

And each of these conclusions has been richly deserved. In Preserved For Posterity, for instance, the retribution of the wronged husband is horrid in the extreme. But then the unjustly punished lover-thief-craftsman of the story was never really guilty of his accused crime. We know that. But then that’s perhaps why he has the final, though silent, laugh at the judgment of eternity. So it is ideas of morality and justice, honesty and loyalty that suffuse Poisoned Petals.

We are presented with people who try to ride roughshod over others, whose understandable, merely human hesitancy, born of their desire to uphold and respect another’s potential for dignity, identifies them as potential prey. Usually the victims win through in the end, turning the tables decisively on their predators. But this often happens only after the victims, themselves, have displayed their ability to become, if provoked, as devious, as base, as calculating and, indeed, as mercenary as the objects of their retribution. And so Poisoned Petals gives some beautiful insights into human behaviour, some vivid illustrations of resourcefulness.

It is a collection to read over a week or two, a few stories at a time, since each is self-contained and memorable. The stories provoke us to reflect on that human condition, and profitably, enjoyably so.

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A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White

A reviewer of A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White is presented with a number of problems, In the paraphrased words of one of the book’s characters, there may be a lot in the wash, but eventually not much to hang out, and this, by the end of the book, largely summed up what it had delivered. Be reassured, however, that the process of reading A Boy’s Own Story is a delight from start to finish. 

Edmund White’s style is quite beautiful, full of complex allusions, superb characterisation and, above all, masterful description. Every character springs to life off the page. If only collectively or individually they had more to offer… 

 A Boy’s Own Story is an adolescent’s discovery and realisation of his own homosexuality. The book promises a lot of sex and, sure enough, it both begins and ends with explicit encounters. Throughout the remainder, however, the sex seems to be more in the mind than in the experience. It appears that Edmund White’s adult recollection of his teenage dilemmas could have been subject to the embellishment of later reflection. Repeatedly the author stretches time to explore the detail of options whenever the boy of the title is presented with a dilemma. These were surely the voices of later years speaking through an ostensibly reconstructed, but surely imagined past. The boy always spoke eloquently about his choices, considered options in detail, but perhaps not convincingly. One of the more engaging aspects of coming of age sagas is how innocence is portrayed and how its conquest is engineered.

In A Boy’s Own Story one feels that Edmund White wants to deny that he was ever innocent, or at least suggest that he would ever admit it. And so a spark that could have lit up the glowing prose never quite ignited. When the book first appeared over twenty years ago, the fact that it did appear in its explicit form, apparently denying the guilt that oozes off every page, might itself have been worthy of note. Twenty years on it now reads as merely dated, but still it reads beautifully thanks to the author’s supreme skill with words and expression. The issues that might previously have rendered it remarkable have, however, long since cooled, so now the reader must approach the book either as it is, as an autobiography, or alternatively in historical terms.

The book, however, cannot sustain the latter approach. I will now certainly seek out other books by Edmund White, but in the case of A Boy’s Own Story I am tempted to conclude that though writers have to be self-obsessed, when that neurosis is turned completely inward, it raises new barriers that can exclude the reader. Hence the gloss. Hence the sheen of the whiter than white washing that proves to be just half a load.

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Faith In Fakes by Umberto Eco

Faith In Fakes by Umberto Eco is a superbly entertaining beginner’s guide to semiotics. To what? Semiotics is the study and interpretation of symbols. In our increasingly iconic age, the discipline has much to say, and to do so must delve deeper and wider, into sociology, philosophy and psychology. In this superb selection of essays, Umberto Eco discusses topics as widely spaced as blue jeans, the film Casablanca, ancient monuments and theme parks. Throughout, he manages to communicate intensely difficult ideas with ease, making Faith In Fakes a truly enlightening read that both informs on theory and entertains via the mundane.

The reader must be prepared to go part-way into the discipline, however, especially in relation to specific authors and rarefied vocabulary. While names such as McLuhan, Foucault and Barthes might not deter most readers, words such as oneiric, corybantism, synecdoche, mytonymy, eversive and anthopophagy could prove to be stumbling blocks. There aren’t many of these specialist words, however, because overall Umberto Eco’s style is beautifully communicative and easy to read.

A particularly pleasing piece was Eco’s analysis of the film Casablanca and its cult status. He contrasts Casablanca with other films, ones that might be cited as “works of art”. He then makes a distinction not because these other films are intrinsically “better”, but because they aim higher in that they are better focused and constructed, intellectually. Basically they have potential meaning or significance, have been well written, well acted and well characterised, though most of them might not achieve any of their targets. Hence they are not necessarily better films.

Casablanca, on the other hand, Eco describes as a hodgepodge (bricolage) of ideas, badly characterised, poorly written and ultimately incredible, either as a film or as a reflection of any kind of reality. (Eco, I am sure, would also argue here that this latter point is wholly valid since the film employs realism both in its style and in its definite historical setting.)

But the point is that a near random juxtaposition of elements eventually becomes an art form of its own, able to make statements in its own terms. Copying from one learned text is called plagiarism, Copy from fifty and it’s called research. Use one cliché and it’s culpable. Use a hundred and it’s called Gaudi. It’s a brilliant point.

As a film, Casablanca, he argues, never inhabits a single genre, never communicates merely a single message. It is presented almost as a series of unrelated tableaux, where the characters do as required by the passing scenario. It thus becomes a pastiche where there’s something for everyone, where it can become more entertaining to spot, categorise, recognise and then discuss the loosely-related vignettes than to appreciate the whole, because there is no whole to appreciate.

McLuhan advised us that the medium had become the message. Eco takes us further, illustrating how mass media are no longer conduits for ideology because they themselves have become the ideology. So now, when we watch television news that concentrates on celebrity and the entertainment industry, we ought to be rendered keenly aware of the motives and interests at play. When, come to think of it, did you last hear a wholly negative film review? So where lies the line between reviewer and promoter?

We seem, according to Eco’s logic, to confuse three similar, related, but different concepts – popular, populist and demotic. What we call popular culture should really be labelled populist culture. Popularity is its aim, not yet its achievement. In a row over music downloaded via the internet, reports in July 2008 claim that over eighty per cent of musicians earn less than five thousand British pounds a year in royalties. And remember that they are the ones that actually have the recording contracts!

So what should we call this not so popular popular music? I argue we should refer to populist music and populist culture, because it aims to achieve popularity, though little of it ever will. But what happens if or when it does? At that point its very success becomes its prime platform for further promotion. Now it carries the illusion of being demotic, that it both stemmed from and is the property of ordinary people, rather than, obviously, a marketed commodity aiming to achieve a status that will foster that illusion. Its adherents to date can now be trotted out as evidence of its potential to attract and as proof of its worthiness to do so. The medium has thus become the ideology, the mechanism by which a commercial enterprise that aspires to popularity from a narrow sectional origin might achieve popularity and then use its achievement to seek more of the same.

Finally, it is the demotic currency provided by success that then suggests we should make aesthetic judgments on that basis. Success becomes proof of worth, almost as if the winner has run for election to that office. Success then becomes the only basis for aesthetic judgments, thus denying the validity of those made an any other basis, because they lack demotic legitimacy and must therefore be based on snobbery or elitism or both. The ideology thus rejects any basis for aesthetic judgment except that which its own ideology defines. Aesthetics, incidentally, tend to resurface when the advocate is reminded of the success, and hence aesthetic worth, of The Bridies’ Song or Remember You’re A Womble!

The essays in Faith In Fakes by Umberto Eco are stimulating, eye-opening and enlightening. They provoke thought rather than the desire to write a simple review. For that, I apologise.

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Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Miraculous Bartok from Valencia Youth

A full symphony orchestra in full flight is a thoroughly rousing experience. When that is combined with a programme that offers contrasting style and form, the result is usually a treat. When the whole is also delivered with the enthusiasm of a youth orchestra, then joy also enters the equation. I would not claim that the Valencian Youth Orchestra performed perfectly in Palau Altea last night, but their efforts were well beyond the creditable. 

Even the two conductors, Robert Ferrer for the first half and then Isaac González were rookies, the latter especially appearing to possess a talent that might mature to fame.

The band began with a concert hall regular, Weber’s Die Freischütz Overture. They played it well, not always accurately, but the relatively simple musical ideas were clear and the lines always joined up. The second work proved to be something of an enigma. I know nothing of the music of Manuel Palau, and unfortunately his Dramatic Concerto for Piano and Orchestra did little prompt further investigation. It was a confused piece, with the orchestra sounding all triadic and modal, like Vaughan Williams 80 years too late, while the soloist mingled styles reminiscent of Rachmaninov and Scriabin, interposed with highly chromatic clusters and even, in the third movement, introducing the opening descending chords of the Schumann concerto as a theme! The orchestra and soloist, Bartolomeu Jaume, played beautifully throughout, but the work let them down. 

The second half began with a recently commissioned work by Miguel Gálvez-Taroncher. His Concerto for Orchestra was quite slow to take off, but take off it did. There was the influence of Kancheli, and also Berg. Small germs of music emerged, sometimes in high dissonance, to be passed around the orchestra’s sections. The giant band sported a veritable battery of percussion for this piece and the forces were eventually well used. The work was effectively a giant single climax, from a confused, quiet, chromaticism to a violent, thrashing, atonal quake. It might not prove to be memorable but it was an engaging, interesting and visceral experience. The composer took a bow. 

Bela Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin is a piece I have known for a long time, but listened to only infrequently. Though originally a ballet, it has rarely been staged outside the concert hall. Anyone who has read the story would understand why. Its sexually explicit plot involving a Chinaman who lights up after he has been hung by the neck from an electricity cable illustrates the challenge. It was 1918 in Central Europe, after all, post-Freud, expressionist and post-World War One. But what an experience! I was genuinely apprehensive about whether the youthful orchestra would be able to play its complex rhythms and fiendishly difficult ensembles. I need not have worried. They were faultless and extremely well rehearsed. When Bartok’s pounding rhythms, all assembled as a fugue, brought the piece to its frantic and exciting conclusion, it sounded as if the music had been driven off the edge of a cliff. Exhilarating! Good luck to the young players of the Valencia Youth Orchestra.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Going down with a bang - Amsterdam Percussion Group in Altea

Percussion ensembles often try to raise the macho to an art form. Loudness and aggression often predominate, usually to the detriment of music. Obvious exceptions would be any Korean samulnori ensemble, where the macho is utterly enshrined, Gary Burton at his best, anything involving Steve Reich and, in the past, occasionally, Kodo. But often they seemed intent on beating the guts out of their Japanese temple drums. 

Now I must add the Amsterdam Percussion Group to the list of subtler performers, their concert in Palau Altea proving to be a complete joy. Altea-born Josep Vicent fronts the group. For six years he was a percussionist with one of the world’s greatest orchestras, the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, and is now also a superb conductor in his own right. Anyone who attended his reading of Bernstein’s West Side Story Suite with the World Orchestra of Jeunesse Musicales in Villajoyosa and La Nucia earlier this year will testify to that. 

But Josep Vicent is also a stunningly accomplished performer and percussionist. Surely he is destined for significant international recognition. The Amsterdam Percussion Group varied from three to six players. The three core members are all percussionists and, in Palau Altea, their battery of instruments was occasionally augmented by cello, guitar and bass guitar. 

The musical style is minimalist, the debt to Steve Reich explicit, but there was Gary Burton there as well in the jazz-style four mallet vibraphone techniques. Fundamental to Steve Reich’s musical personality was the idea of performance above recording and, surely, this philosophy was fundamental to everything offered by Josep Vicent’s group. 

They started with what proved to be a weakness, apparently improvising a climactic modal interchange over a musique concrète tape. In the 1960s I might have been impressed. The cello piece that followed eventually became vibraphone and bass guitar, and again it left a lot to be desired in the inspiration box.  

Then things came to life. The three percussionists played four tuned drums, offering a piece reminiscent of the first part of Steve Reich’s Drumming. It was superbly done, loud and musical, its rhythms complex yet immediately memorable. 

Quiet then intervened in the form of a Piazzolla tango played by a quintet, again with vibes and marimba. This was followed by one of the evening’s true high points, a piece called Black Page by Frank Zappa. The first section’s difficult chromatic cello led on to a ferocious and supremely skilful unison doubling of Josep Vicent’s drums and the marimba of Mike Schaperclaus, before the piece made its minimal point in vast proportions. 

The evening’s high point came next. It was the quietest piece of the night, played by the three percussionists, Josep, Mike and Arie de Boer, seated like kids at a party on the edge of the stage. Before them were three square bits of smooth plywood, each mounted on what appeared to be a couple of off cuts of two-by-one, amplified. With forehand and backhand strokes, finger prods, karate chops, slaps and taps, the three of them offered Table Music by Thierry de Mey, a percussive ballet for six hands. 

A sextet reminiscent of Gary Burton’s early jazz followed and then a piece of pure Africa, a fast, explosive piece of Burundian drumming. A flamenco-style sextet with guitar completed the performance, which was greeted with a universal standing ovation, and deservedly so. If you missed this one, there’s always the next time. They were exciting, subtle and musical, as well as loud. Josep Vicent will be back. He’s from Altea, after all.