Review: Jennie Rooney, Red Joan

I picked up this book for a peculiar reason: the story of Red Joan draws partly on the real-life story of Melita Norwood who - some years ago and at the age of 87 - was exposed as a (former) Soviet spy who had passed important atomic secrets to the Soviet Union during the period when it was seeking to develop its own atomic weapons. She was living an unremarkable and modest life in the London suburbs and the British powers-that-be wisely decided not to prosecute her. She was old though still dignified and spry enough to make a public statement about her spying. She was a surprising and not unsympathetic character. She was nicknamed “The Spy Who Came In from the Co-op”.

Melita Norwood, apart from these important things, was the widow of Hilary Norwood – a life-long Communist and schoolteacher (of mathematics, if I recall rightly) who was also - for some time after the War  -President of the British Society of Russian Philately, of which I am a member (since the 1990s - unfortunately, I never met him or Melita Norwood). The Society was founded in the 1930s and many of the original members were Communists or Fellow Travellers. That is no longer true – fortunately, perhaps, because the Society holds its Annual Meeting in London’s Army and Navy club. Its French sister society La Cercle Philatélique France – Russie still meets in the governmental Russian Cultural Centre in Paris, but that of course has changed its flag in recent years.

And now to the novel, which is uneven. The structure works – moving from narratives set in the 1930s and 1940s to recall of those events during an interrogation of the elderly Joan. The Mills and Boon romances (there are two) may work for some, though didn’t for me. 

The explanation of Why? Joan spied is very well done and is morally challenging: she spied because of Hiroshima and wanted to ensure that America could not do to Russia what it had done to Japan. In that sense, she helped develop a situation of Mutually Assured Destruction which came to be called deterrence.

There are anachronisms which are disconcerting, even though they are sometimes the anachronisms of fictional documents being quoted: “Born Leningrad, 20 May 1913” (page 90), “died in St Petersburg in 1982” (page 339), for example; and in a letter of 1949, written in English in England by someone without the background which would enable it, we find “Qu’ran”. 

And there is one bizarre passage which has a 1940s KGB document denouncing one of its victims as an enemy of “the Soviet Empire”(p 285). Enough to get a KGB man shot. Nowadays, maybe he could blame some American Imperialist spell-checker.

Review: J.M.Coetzee, the Life of Jesus

“Something’s Missing”

“This sentence, which is in Mahagonny, is one of the most profound sentences that Brecht ever wrote and it is in two words” (Ernst Bloch)

To feel that something’s missing is to feel that some other world – some new world – is possible, some world which is not this wearying reality of ours. It is the feeling which inspires both religion and utopian politics.

Coetzee’s Simón makes use of this expression. He finds and rescues the lost child David, takes him to a new world where he identifies by pure intuition a seemingly unlikely woman, Inès, as the child’s mother. Together but not together, the two of them struggle to bring up David  - a wilful child just made for psychological labelling and intervention. Eventually, they flee seeking a second new life.

Coetzee sets his novel in a Spanish-speaking geography which might be Argentina (“Punta Arenas” for example). But the social world he describes has something wrong with it – it seems to be straightforward but becomes opaque. It is not a real social world, though its inhabitants seem contented enough and are untroubled with any thoughts that something might be missing. But Simón thinks otherwise. Something is missing.

At first, I thought it would be necessary to decode the story – to nail it down onto the firmer foundation of Joseph, Jesus and Mary. So when, for example, we are told that Simón and David make their way to their new world through a resettlement camp, Belstar – well, I just thought “Bethlehem Star”.

But then I decided that this was a stupid way to read this book and, after that, it got better. And it’s very good not least because you are constantly presented with situations in which you have sympathies pulling you both ways. It is as if the book is made up of vividly presented dilemmas – practical, moral, personal … - which have the common quality of having no obvious right answer.

It’s all very unsettling if you want a straightforward story – but then of course, just to add to your dilemmas, you do also get a straightforward story which holds your attention. You want to know what in the end will become of Simón and David and Inès and some of the other characters in the cast.

And as if things are not complicated enough,, and in case you are still thinking that the book must have a Key, then you have to cope with the fact that David learns to read from just one book and only reads that book and that it is referred to throughout. Don Quixote.

A fascinating book.

Review: Jim Crace, Harvest

Lebensraum for sheep - that was a major aim of England’s Enclosure movement which cleared the countryside of people and replaced them with wool-producers. The people ended up in towns and cities - forced draft urbanisation – and often enough, working with wool. Or else, drowning their sorrows in drink.

Jim Crace has imagined the arrival of Enclosure through the eyes of one man, Walter Thirsk, the first-person narrator of this 270 page novel. Positioned as someone ranking a bit above the ordinary peasantry but as much a helper than a servant to the old Master, Walter is not a hero, has many flaws and faults – but not any shortage of vocabulary.

Crace succeeds in filling his narrator with fine descriptive powers, a lucid ability to express his inner turmoil, well-turned phrases and, perhaps above all, a sense of pace.

As in other novels by Crace that I have read, the pacing is extraordinary. A tired reader will occasionally want the pace to quicken but Crace always takes his time and always uses it well. He has a story to tell and he wants you to attend to it. It’s not going to be complicated and he’s not going to try to mislead you or bamboozle you. He’s a story teller.

Like Quarantine and The Pesthouse, which I have also read, this is a very fine book.

Film Review: NOAH (Daniel Aronofsky)

It's some time since I went to the cinema and even longer since I went to an Odeon in Leicester Square. It didn't take me long to remember why I'm not so keen on these places: the advertising, the trailers for identikit violent films, the constant WwwwHhhhOooooooooshing to remind you that they have Surround Sound or whatever it is now called.

Noah got a very positive review in The Financial Times so I overcame my suspicions about Bible Blockbusters and took my seat.

I don't know enough about the theology but I would bet my lunch that the story of Noah is not about a war between Veggies and Carnivores. And if Noah had "Helpers" [ a traditonal folk tale category] they surely weren't animations - Jurassic Park but on speed.

That said, the film works not because of the animations or the Surround Sound, effective as they quite often are, but because of the well-scripted and acted family drama at the heart of the film. Noah, a reflective Hippie patriarch (California circa 1970?), loses the plot. He concludes that God wants to save the Animals but wants Humankind to perish. Despite a lot of strong woman opposition and some female guile it is only a last-moment epiphany which saves him from his misreading of the omens and portents. And so except for Ham, all ends well and all will continue well ( if you get past the stage of unavoidable incest).

I enjoyed my afternoon virtually alone in a Leicester Square cinema; but I didn't dream about the film.

Essay: Some Doubts about Universities and the Humanities

I have always had my doubts about universities. If you take the long view, they have rarely encouraged scientific enquiry or tolerance of different opinions. Often enough, they have not been so very different from overtly theological seminaries which don’t even pretend to value Science or Toleration. Both universities and seminaries recruit from the same age groups and – until very, very recently – they have only been interested in recruiting those biologically sexed as male.  The teachers have been even more exclusively male, often with a requirement of Celibacy or (what used to be called) Bachelorhood. In the long view, the history of a university like Oxford makes you wonder why we bother. 

It’s easy to think that things have changed and it is not like the bad old days. I’m not so sure and I’m not so sure it could be otherwise.

Ironically, it is in those countries and cultures which appear most attached to the values of Truth and Tolerance that sceptical (“deconstructionist”), relativist (anti – “humanist”) and anti-realist (anti – “essentialist”) theories have been in vogue among university teachers who then – unable to appeal to any notions of Truth or Right – substitute Disapproval or Outrage for any kind of considered Judgement on the ill-considered opinions of their students or the misguided views of colleagues who shouldn’t be.

I’m thinking about places like Literature Departments in British and American universities, bursting at the seams with young seminarians anxiously working out what they must say to please their professors.

Of course, the kinds of science in which Literature departments could engage are not the same as those deployed by the Physics departments, though there may be some overlap. As places where Texts are read, the essential discipline for a Literature student is the ability to pay attention to the Text. From there, it’s possible to go on to respond to and Interpret it in an indefinite number of ways – as Comic, Tragic or Pornographic; as the Expression of a personality, as the (witting or unwitting) vehicle for an Ideology, as belonging to a Tradition, as embodying a distinctive Voice, as in (acknowledged or unconscious) Dialogue with other Texts – and so on and so forth. As you respond and Interpret, so the Text itself may re-focus: you notice things you didn’t notice the first time round. So Interpretation has no obvious end (as the deconstructionists would agree), though it may approach it asymptotically by which I mean that sometimes we exhaust the plausible possibilities and supposed new interpretations seem arbitrary and forced.

At their worst (and this is not something new), a course in a Literature department is about putting a text through a Grinder. In the past, it was sometimes a Marxist Grinder - made bearable by the introduction of a distinction between “Naturalist” novels which were politically correct but, unfortunately, boring and “Realist” novels which were bourgeois but much more fun. Today, the Grinder is more likely to be some version of Deconstructionism-cum-Feminism-cum-Queer-Theory. Whether these new theories accommodate a distinction between Boring and Fun I don’t know, which is probably a bad sign.

The Grinders are products of the university system, not of great Theorists or Theories. They are ways of making it possible for students to write term papers and for the term papers to be sufficiently alike for tutors to grade them. 

There seems an in-built tendency for the Grinders to produce essays which read less like (literary) Criticism and more like (political) Denunciation – or, occasionally, Endorsement, though I think  it’s harder (maybe intrinsically harder) to write an A grade essay for saying nice things about a book.

I think we might get better work done in the humanities and some of the social sciences without the seminaries. If people want to read books together, there can be evening classes, book clubs, residential weekends. We don’t really need the big bureaucracies, the professional career structure and the clubs of like-minded people giving each other a leg up.

In recent years, some of the best books I have read are the work of very clever people who haven’t followed the career path into university teaching but, instead, have become political activists or bankers or serious journalists.

I will mis-use a tripartite classification from Roland Barthes. Writers have no future as writers if they can’t write. Intellectuals need ideas - a vision even - or else no one will listen. But Professors can advance in their careers and hang their hats on a decent pension though quite unable to write and pretty much devoid of ideas. They have the power to make generations of students labour over unreadable and soon-to-be-demoted books which in a free world would be left unread and never promoted in the first place.

Review: Ferdinand von Schirach, The Collini Case

I read this short and big-print novel at a single sitting, so that’s a recommendation. Yet the style is set at a sort of degree zero of plainness, slipping occasionally into pedantry. The structure is that of a murder mystery – the killer is known but not his motive. There is an (obstructed) quest for truth  by a youthful hero; there is a Helper; a court-room trial of strength; and a hint of a happy and romantic ending. As I write that summary, I realise I am  describing it as a Fairy Story or Folk Tale. You could probably bring Vladimir Propp to its structural analysis.

But it’s subject matter could not be more serious. It is a Roman à Thèse which culminates by demonstrating a weakness in the (real world) criminal code of the Federal Republic of Germany, a weakness due specifically to a seemingly innocuous amendment, inserted administratively in 1968 by a former prominent Nazi lawyer (Dr Eduard Dreher). The effect was to pull the rug from under a large number of ongoing investigations into Nazi war criminals by extending the scope of a statute of limitations.

Von Schirach happens to be a lawyer in real life and uses the novel to dramatise these consequences.

From a note annexed to von Schirach’s book (page 189 ), his novel has been added into an ongoing official review of  the 1968 amendment and related matters. In another book I reviewed here recently, Beorn’s Marching into Darkness, there is a discussion of  the same topic (in Chapter Nine, Endgame).

I haven’t looked at the German original. English readers will probably miss the clue to the murder mystery provided by the first occurrence of the word “Ludwigsburg” (p 110) – home to the Federal German centre for investigating Nazi war crimes – but apart from that, this book is probably as accessible to the English reader as it is to the German. 

It is a separate topic, but it is interesting to look at this novel as an example of the thoroughness with which younger Germans (von Schirach was born in 1964) are willing to think about the Nazi past. It is a way of thinking I don't think one sees in Russia, thinking about Stalinism, or France, thinking about its own Nazism.

Review: John Cornwell, The Dark Box

I find it quite easy to believe in Freedom of Conscience and quite hard to go on believing in Freedom of Religion. The latter now serves primarily to exempt from ordinary forms of accountability powerful and worldly organisations most of which are of a more-or-less criminal nature. The Roman Catholic Church is the Big Daddy of the type.

The appeal of the Roman Catholic Church baffles me, though not in the case of worldly and more-or-less criminal individuals drawn to it by the incense of power.

John Cornwell is a born-again Catholic who, while lapsed, nonetheless allowed  his own children to be brought up in the faith and he has written a book which promises a challenge but ends up being intellectually and morally flabby, a damp squib.

Cornwell picks a good topic –the role of Confession in securing the hold of the Church over its individual members – and in relation to the Church’s cruelty over the past hundred years, he makes an interesting and sometimes passionate case against Pope Pius X.

A nasty piece of work by name of Giuseppe Sarto, Pius X arrived at the core ideas of modern totalitarianism while Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin were still schoolboys. 

Confession has a role at the base of the totalitarian scheme; the wider totalitarian ambition was only realised in the Catholic fiefdoms – Ireland, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain. 

Of these proto - North Koreas, Slovakia was closed down by the victorious allied powers. The others are still emerging from the trauma of clerical fascism – in Ireland’s case, with no encouragement from the old Imperial power: shamefully, the United Kingdom rolled out the red carpet for Pope Benedict XVI at a time when the former Joseph Ratzinger could not have set foot in Ireland.

Cornwell sticks to the narrower context and at the core of his book is the argument that Pius X’s demand that Confession start at six or seven instead of fourteen or fifteen ruined the lives of many children, not only from sexual abuse in the Confessional, but from the universe of psychological Terror surrounding it.

Intellectually, there is just too much bland anecdotal material, padding out the text. So we learn, for example that Pius X:

Chose as his secretary of state the suave Anglo-Spanish prelate Rafael Merry del Val, although the latter was not yet forty years old. A consummate diplomat, and highly intelligent, Merry del Val spoke a number of languages and had an enormous capacity for administrative work” (page 81)

Morally, Cornwell assembles the case against the Church and then, it seems to me, seeks to persuade us that it could all be dealt with by feel-good internal reforms. He cannot see that the Church has only ever been responsive to external changes and force, never to internal moral argument or pressure. (You get excommunicated or exiled for that – Pope Benedict made his career out of silencing the internal opposition).

The Church’s conversion to the cause of Democracy dates only from the moment when American tanks showed up in Rome. I don’t think there is any way it can be converted to decency. It's never been in that business. It just has to be closed down.

So why do Catholics like Cornwell stick with - and even return to - a Church which they know is vicious at its heart? For the same reasons that if we closed down North Korea there would still be those for whom the guilt of betrayal would be assuaged by longing for the Kim dynasty. For the same reasons that in Russia there are still those who long for the Romanovs or Stalin. Erich Fromm called it the Fear of Freedom. It’s the fear which prevents you seeing that the way out is through the door.