A Mad World, My Masters by John Simpson

In A Mad World, My Masters John Simpson presents a set of observations and anecdotes drawn from a near lifetime of reporting for television news. Over a career spanning decades, John Simpson has worked on many of the major stories of recent history. He has covered conflicts, such as the Gulf War and the Balkans, general interest stories, such as Hong Kong’s transfer and the new millennium, and more general issues such as such as the drugs and arms trades. But it is John Simpson’s contact with political leaders and heads of state that adds real spice to these memoirs, some of his contacts proving decidedly surreal, all of them offering unusual insight. The book is organised around themes, such as journeys, villains, spies, bombing and absurdities. This allows the presentation of similar kinds of experience derived from different trips. It does also facilitate the reading of the book via casual dips. A consequence is that the whole experience becomes rather episodic. 

Apart from the sometimes tenuous theme, there is little attempt to create a consistent, general narrative. Again this facilitates the casual read, but it might antagonise a reader who wants a tad more reflection from the author. The thematic arrangement also means that on several occasions the reader re-visits a trip, leading to some inevitable repetition of material. This, however, is kept to a minimum and does not detract from the overall experience if an occasional feeling of impatience is ignored.

Thus far this review has sounded like a lukewarm reception, but this would be far from the truth of the experience. The book’s subject matter alone is thought-provoking, stimulating and enlightening. In addition, John Simpson’s own observations are quite wonderful. And this mix is persuasive. The reader feels that the book “takes you there” rather than “tells us what it’s like”. It is the vividness of John Simpson’s recollections and related experience that brings so much of the subject matter completely to life that we feel we might have smelled Gaddafi’s flatulence, sensed a Peruvian mayor’s danger or felt an Iraqi Kurd’s bitterness. Anyone familiar with John Simpson’s exemplary reporting for the BBC will expect these anecdotes to contain more than trivia or merely personal experience, and, thus, will not be disappointed. But it is when the author deals with the mechanics and technicalities of news gathering that some of the more vivid experiences appear. We often forget that the process is dangerous, tiring and relentless if the product is to contain even a grain of interest. Throughout, John Simpson acknowledges the difficulties, but he also always recognises the contributions of others to the teamwork that is clearly essential to the process.

This book has much to offer to anyone interested in recent history or current affairs. Even those who are unfamiliar with the author’s broadcasting work will discover engaging and arresting perspectives on many issues and, in some cases, there will be analyses that will question some generally accepted positions. The book may be a little too long, but its consistent high quality ensures that this is barely an issue.

Arte Español Para Extranjeros by Ricardo Abrantes, Araceli Fernández, Santiago Manzarbeitia

Arte Español Para Extranjeros by Ricardo Abrantes, Araceli Fernández, Santiago Manzarbeitia is a superb idea, an excellent read and a perfect way of practising the language. The book charts chronologically the eras and styles of Spanish art. It starts with the pre-historical and archaeological, travels via the Iberian period, the Romans and the Visigoths, to the centuries of Islamic art and the Romanesque. By the time we have reached Gothic art, we almost feel we have come up to date. The Renaissance was not as big an issue in Spain as elsewhere in Europe, but the Baroque flowered and led into what the authors call the modern era. Goya is presented quite convincingly almost as a Beethoven of painting, in other words a figure from whose work almost two hundred years of future development can be traced. Picasso, Dali and Miró bring us into the contemporary era and the book’s final pages present abstract expressionism and works of Chillada.

The Spanish text is immediately accessible. The descriptions are succinct and clearly written. Technical terms are included in a useful glossary whose definitions could not be more accessible or better written. Though there are copious illustrations, this is no mere picture book. The examples have been included to illustrate the text and they carry out the task admirably, thus offering quite remarkable clarity to the excellent descriptions of style, technique and content.

What is so intriguing about Spanish art, the fact that separates it from the rest of Europe, is the Islamic period. Artistic and literary achievements in particular during those centuries have continued to influence both Spain’s cultural life and its language. No other European country has this complexity. Too often, however, the Islamic period is presented as something separate, something overcome and wholly in the past. This is not so in Arte Español Para Extranjeros. Not only via references to mozarabe and mudejar, but also by noting how stylistic elements were adopted by Islamic, Christian and Jewish artists and architects, the authors manage to present a portrait of Spanish art that represents a real synthesis. A visit to the National Museum of Catalan Art (MNAC) in Barcelona would point out how the resplendent Gothic period of religious painting in Spain owes much to contact with northern Europe, Flanders in particular, and little to Italian influence.

In Arte Español Para Extranjeros the text presents this relationship with great clarity and also adequately describes the political and trading context that led to these influences prevailing above those from the geographically closer Mediterranean areas. Non-native Spanish speakers who have even the remotest interest in the arts will find this book captivating and useful in two ways. First its very accessibility makes it a perfect vehicle for the language learner to improve reading skills and vocabulary. But on another level, the book’s ambitious project really does deliver clear, interesting and enlightening observations on style and influence. Arte Español Para Extranjeros was a very ambitious project that could so easily have failed to deliver. In the hands of its three authors, however, it has delivered an almost faultless success.

The Girl At The Lion D’Or by Sebastian Faulks

The Girl At The Lion D’Or, a novel by Sebastian Faulks, presents a love story which is both engaging and poignant. But because of the book’s setting in 1930s France, there is also much historical and political colour that significantly broadens the novel’s scope. Anne is a poor, but attractive girl. Her family life was disrupted by the First World War. In this she is not alone. But, as the narrative progresses, we learn that her story is rather more complex than the common, but still tragic one, of family members killed in action.

In Anne’s case there was also something to hide. Thus she was orphaned, and perhaps never really had a home she could call her own. 

At the start of The Girl At The Lion D’Or, Anne is about to make a change in her life – and not for the first time – by leaving Paris to find a job elsewhere. That elsewhere is Janvilliers, a provincial town, where she is reluctantly accepted as a waitress in the small hotel of the book’s title. Anne is a beautiful woman, perhaps more arresting even than that, and it is not long before some of the restaurant’s clientele are taking note of her charms.

One such client is a middle class businessman called Hartmann. He is married and lives in a large, rangy mansion whose rooms perhaps have their own stories to tell. There develops a liaison that forms the novel’s primary plot. Along the way we learn much about Anne’s background and the Hartmann’s modus vivendi. There are other characters, of course, and these are convincingly portrayed to create a picture of French inter-war provincial life. There’s the owner of the hotel, for instance, who seems reluctant to leave his flat. There’s the domineering – perhaps threatening – manageress who aspires to higher moral ground. There’s a builder who builds none too well and there are others whose attentions, lecherous and otherwise, are arrested by Anne’s beauty.

But also this is France just prior to the outbreak of World War two. There are rumblings about Jews, about ultra-nationalism, about political leaders in disarray who sway this way and that. There are many stories of loss still vivid from the previous war, stories whose pain has not yet dissipated and whose memory will soon be obliterated by new conflict. Sebastain Faulks’s novel is not a spectacular read. It does not try to be so. It is, however, a sensitive, informed and often beautiful portrayal of love set against a backdrop full of quite real humanity.

Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera

If only Milan Kundera’s short story collection Laughable Loves had been simply an enjoyable read… Several other adjectives come to mind: arresting, compelling, strange, detached, sometimes disappointing. None of these get to the core of the work, a core that, on finishing the book, might seem more elusive than at any time during the progress of the text.

In Laughable Loves we are presented with characters that often seem to behave like cut-outs being pushed across a stage whose set is alien to them. They often seem only partially engaged with their own lives, even lost in their surroundings, no matter how familiar they are claimed to be. They are apparently controlled by others, perhaps by forces not only beyond their control, but also beyond their influence, even beyond their experience.

On the surface, however, this is not a book about totalitarianism or overt control. There are hardly any overtly political themes or references. As a background, as might be expected, this seems to be taken as given. There are references to a faceless system here and there, but this in no Kafka-esque construction of an all-embracing and constraining reality.

In Laughable Loves Milan Kundera seems to imprison people primarily within the demands of their own humanity. They seem to be enslaved by their own, inevitable, controllable but not controlled urges. This is fundamental behaviour that they think they can control, but the fact that they cannot confirms that it controls them. And, of course, the urge of sex, the reality of sex, the realisation of sex, the promise of sex, the deferment of sex, the doing of sex, all of these vie for the forefront of consciousness, their common factor apparently both the motive and the end of all intent. We may play with gods, careers, influence or power, but our ultimate and single-minded motive is the achievement of the momentary majesty of sexual communion. In his film, Casanova may have been likened to an erectile clockwork toy, pre-ordained by virtue of inevitable, hard-wired mechanism to perform whenever wound up.

And in this book, Kundera presents people who mimic such automata, except that occasionally a spring gives, or a cog slips. “Ah, ladies and gentlemen,” he writes, “a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anyone or anything seriously.” But almost no-one in these stories is eventually serious about anything, except the sex drive that controls them and whose realisation so often results in no more than sensations of the ephemeral. Immediately it is the next time that is yearned. They are thus all sad, quite absurdly sad, even as the invisible hand that manipulates their cut-out play in an alien theatre makes them move and perform. Even sadder is the human cut-out who doesn’t even believe that such a controlling hand might exist.

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

Time is undoubtedly linear, but our perception of it is not. And for Claudia Hampton, the principal character of Penelope Lively’s novel, Moon Tiger, time, manifest as her life, is a veritable jumble of memories, unfulfilled ambition, probabilities and denied possibilities. She is confused, at least on the outside, and lying infirm in a nursing home bed. But her mind is alive with a life lived, a life she distils to share with us. Claudia´s confusion, however, is only an external phenomenon. Internally her memory is sharp, if not ordered. She reminisces on childhood, eager sexual awakening in adolescence, a career as a war correspondent, historian and writer, an affair or two, one very special but doomed, an eventual marriage, maturity, parenthood and old age, but not necessarily in that order.

Events are assembled and revisited. Along the way there has been death, birth, a miscarriage, disappointment, fulfilment and ambition, seasoned with shakings of passion, hatred, pride and not a little incest. It has been an interesting life, especially remarkable for the way that Claudia relives it for us. Claudia’s memories are often intense. There is an attention to detail that renders her character completely three dimensional, four if you include time. She has struggled – and continues to do so – with what seems to be a fundamental lack of love for her daughter, Lisa, and a deep impatience with her grandchildren.

Jasper, her partner, was something of a disappointment, but at least a reassuring one, after war had dealt cruelly with what she herself had wanted. Claudia not only recalls but also relives her passion. She has often been free with her affections, but she has only once given herself completely. Her recollections of the horrors of war are both raw and stark. There is no heroism here: heroic deeds maybe, but only when the protagonists effect them by default. But in many ways Claudia’s life stopped those years ago in the nineteen forties.

What life promised would never be realised and what it had generated died before it truly came to life. Living has thus been a compromise that Claudia herself was only partially willing to make. It is into the gaps left by compromise that occasional views of her from another’s perspective add real spice to the narrative. Moon Tiger is a complex, challenging read. It is so rewarding, however, that time stands still while you read, but then, at the end, seems to have flashed by in an instant. The instant, of course, was Claudia’s life. Moon Tiger was a brand of mosquito repellent that Claudia and her lover burned during their brief time together in Egypt. What was left was just a little ash.

The Republic Of Love by Carol Shields

Republics do not have kings or queens, nor princes or princesses, so, we must assume, fairytales are out. Winnipeg is not exactly a republic, and, at least in terms of their love lives, two residents of the city, Fay and Tom, seem to inhabit a world where fairytales are inconceivable. But that place might not be Winnipeg: it might be closer in to themselves.

Despite – or perhaps because of - having had a multitude of mothers, Tom has been married three times, each attempt turning success into apparent and mildly painful failure, with or sometimes without associated acrimony.

For her part, Fay, at thirty-five, has had several relationships of varied length, but none has led to wedding bells, a fact that seems to trouble her, sometimes. Tom is a radio presenter. He hosts one of those late night phone-ins aimed at insomniacs, but usually attracting the opinionated.

His mood, his history, his takes on where life has taken him clearly influence his style. Rises or dips in his personal life are immediately apparent, communicated without trying. But do not assume that anything offers even influence to what the contributors say. Rest assured, they will offer precisely what they want, perhaps precisely what they have been fed, if only because they are all as self-absorbed as everyone else. Fay works more regular hours.

She is an ethnologist and works in a folklore centre. She is heavily into mermaids, and perhaps they are also into her. She researches the mermaid myth, catalogues sightings, interviews people who have seem them, travels the world giving papers on our social and psychological need to invent these creatures. Mermaids, though overtly sexual and obviously female, are eventually sexless, unless they have exaggerated tails. They are both alluring and inviting, but, being half fish, they are cold-blooded and cold. They tempt, but cannot satisfy. Obviously Tom and Fay are going to meet.

They, along with their accumulated baggage, join forces and, as a consequence, begin to see life differently. But each is still influenced by relatives, acquaintances, ex-partners, ex-in-laws, new partners, parents and anyone else who might have an opinion. They all count. They all influence, especially when stiffness of apparent resolve can be easily bent by contradiction, shock or surprise. And so Fay and Tom’s relationship develops to what Carol Shields deems it should become.

Throughout The Republic Of Love is beautifully written. Carol Shields’s prose is often witty, elegant, telling, funny, incisive or provocative all in one. A single sentence can turn on itself to frighten or mock its own beginning. This is a book worth reading for its style alone. But it offers more than elegance of expression. These characters have all the confused confident complexity, the undirected and variable resolve we would expect from non-ideological adults in the last decade of the twentieth century. It would be interesting to revisit them twenty years on to see where they are now, to know if anything might have lasted. In The Republic Of Love they certainly come to life.

Fools Of Fortune by William Trevor

Generally, genre thrillers are books without thrills. Someone gets killed. Turn the page and it happens again to someone else. There’s a chase, a near miss; da capo al fine; repeat. There are never consequences. Characters seem to exist – they never come to life – in an eternal present devoid of either thought or reflection. Plot is a series of events, while characters are mere fashionably dressed acts. William Trevor’s beautiful novel, Fools Of Fortune is, in many ways, a whodunit – or better who done what – thriller. But it transcends genre because it is the consequences of the actions and their motives that feature large, that provide plot and ultimately a credible, if tragic humanity.

Fools Of Fortune is a novel that presents tragedy not merely as a vehicle for portraying raw emotion, but rather as a means of illustrating the depth of ensuing consequence, both historical and personal. In conflict it is easy to list events, quote numbers, suggest outcome, but it is rare to have a feel of how momentous events can have life-long consequences for those involved, consequences that even protagonists cannot envisage, consequences that can affect the lives of those not even involved.

William Trevor’s book is set in Ireland. Its story spans decades, but the crucial elements of the plot are placed in the second decade of the twentieth century. They do involve the First World War, but really as a sideshow to the issue of Home Rule for Ireland. The Quinton family are Protestants living in an old house called Kinleagh in County Cork. Willie Quinton is a child, initially home schooled by a priest called Kilgarriff, who has a highly personal view of the world. We see many of the events through Willie’s child eyes, including a surreptitious meeting between Willie’s father and a famous man who visits on a motorbike. The family owns a flour mill. They are quite well off, a fact that is clearly appreciated by some and resented by others. Crucially, it is this availability of finance that leads to a downfall, events that lead to deaths, destruction and calls for revenge. Willie’s life is transformed for ever.

Over the water, the Woodcombes of Woodcombe Park, Dorset, have a daughter called Marianne. The Woodcombes and the Quintons are related. Marianne is Willie’s cousin. On a visit to Kinleagh she falls in love with Willie. She is a small, delicate girl. She has experience of a Swiss finishing school, a stay that brings exposure to practices that are not wholly educational. Marianne returns to Kinleagh to find Willie. She has important news, but finds that devastation has hit the Quinton household, a culmination of events beyond the control of any individual. No-one wants to talk about what might have happened, and no-one admits to the whereabouts of Willie. Marianne stays to wait for his return. It proves to be a long wait.

There is vengeance in the air, and unforeseen consequences for a child who apparently played no part in any of the events. She was blameless, a mere recipient of the consequences of others’ actions, of others’ grief. William Trevor tells the tale of Fools Of Fortune as serial memoirs of those involved, primarily Willie and Marianne. Some of the school experiences that form a significant part of the story are comic, and offer some relief to the pressure of unfolding tragedy. But central to the book’s non-linear discovery of motive and consequence is the fact that events can dictate the content of lives, and sometimes individuals appear as no more than powerless pawns in games dictated by others. We are all participants, but not always on our own terms.