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Back on 11 August 2016, I reviewed here Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography which I felt had a lot of zest and a clearly-articulated argument. As a result, his publisher sent me this new book to review.
It also has a lot of
zest and a great deal of incidental detail for those interested in Pub Quizzes
and such like. But it does not have the analytical sharpness of the previous
book and this is probably inevitable given its subject matter, a history of
mostly national flags and their symbolism. A few things struck me.
Flags, flagpoles and
rules about hoisting flags onto their poles etc are pretty much cultural
universals. This is in some ways rather odd, since the whole business is a
fairly arbitrary one. True, there are some motivated explanations of how flags
came into existence – so that you could see where your own lot were re-grouping
during the battle, and so on – but this hardly explains the universality and
large measure of conformity we have got to now.
Where we have got to
now also leaves many flags unresponsive in their design to the fact that they
will (mostly) be flown at the top of large static poles. Just a couple of more
modern flags – those of South Africa and, notably, Seychelles have dynamic designs
which respond to the possibilities opened up by the fact that they will be
attached to a pole at the left side and flutter out from that static point.
Most flags are symmetrical, imagined from the standpoint of someone (the
designer) looking at them as illustrations on a page. Many are also cluttered
with detail which, though visible to designers at work on the page in front of
them, will be lost on those casting an upward glance at a pole. Most of the
flags of Latin America – Brazil an obvious exception - look to me ripe for a
design overhaul. They are without flag-design or artistic merit.
Quite a lot of Tim
Marshall’s text is devoted to explanation of the symbolism of individual flags.
This is necessary because though flags are usually icons of something or other,
what something or other it is has to be pointed out – so “X stands for Y” and
then, once we are told, we see it. Technically, this is to say that flags make
a great deal of use of translucent icons
as opposed to transparent ones. An
icon is transparent when pretty much anyone can see what is meant without any
supporting verbal explanation – most road warning signs are meant to be like
this, so that you can understand them wherever you are coming from. But there
are resemblances between sign and object which have to be pointed out and the same
sign may mean more than one thing: on one flag, the colour Green may stand for
Islam, but on another it may stand for a nation’s forests or fields.
Over fifty years ago, I
had a summer job in a lakeside Swedish hotel. One of my duties was to raise and
lower the very large Swedish flag each day from its very large pole. I realised
early on that I was being watched from guest windows as I performed my tasks,
and so I adopted a sort of Boy Scout formality, marching briskly to the pole
and so on. Somehow - perhaps because I had indeed been a Boy Scout - I knew that I should fold the flag carefully when taking it
down and at no point when it was going up or down allow it to touch the ground.
Such indeed are the expectations in Sweden and most other places, but at some
point one guest did congratulate me on how I did the job. He also explained to
me what the colours of the flag represented: blue for the sky and yellow for
silver birch leaves. But I bet that isn’t the only explanation around for Sveriges
farger. No one made an issue of the fact that it was an English
schoolboy handling the Swedish flag.
