Oxford Review of Books Volume 1 Issue 1 by theORB

On the Edge of Wonder:

How Literature Can Save Nature

Edges of Wonder – where Man meets Nature

A Soul is a Strange Factory:

A new poem by Simon Armitage

The strange world of Raymond Roussel

Interviews with Derek Jacobi, Peter Singer, Helen Dunmore, Philippe Sands and Nick Clegg Reviews of House of Names, East West Street, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, Bleak Liberalism

Liberalism Realised�

A Political System in Crisis

A New Poem by Simon Armitage Interviews with:

Derek Jacobi, Peter Singer, Helen Dunmore, Philippe Sands & Nick Clegg issue 1 – 9th june 2017

Oxford Review of Books Issue 1 – 9th June 2017 Submissions and letters to: editor@the-orb.org

Contents

Team

On the Edge of Wonder – Chris Page

Two Kinds of Murder – Daniel Kodsi

Mr Clegg's Zoetrope – Benjamin Davies

Poem: ‘Dustsceawung’ – Dominic Fraser Leonard

Humanity 2.0 – Daniel Sutton

Escaping the Revolution – Niloo Sharifi

Ian McEwan's Brave New World – Hugo Murphy

Locked up Literature – Clarissa Mayhew

If Paths Could Speak – Jem Bossata

The Consequential Philosopher – John Maier

Poem: ‘Displacements’ – Simon Armitage

A Soul is a Strange Factory – Gaby Mancey-Jones

The 29 Steps – Jess Brown

The Burden of Retelling – Katie Mennis

Poem: ‘Mortify’ – Annie Hayter

A Faceless Icon – Susie Finlay

Liberalism Realised? – Oliver Bealby-Wright

Faith under Fire – Laela Zaidi

Poem: [Untitled] – Christopher Eastwood

Where Words Fail – Ellie Duncan

Something Amis – Ethan Croft

Making Luther Great Again? – Benn Sheridan

The Astronomer – Mary Anne Clark

The Galápagos – Toby Clyde

We Are All Prince Hamlet – Katie Mennis

Benjamin Davies reads English at Brasenose. He lives in fear that Cormac McCarthy will die before finishing his next book. Benn Sheridan reads History at Magdalen. Reluctantly. Christopher Page reads English at Hertford, when not earnestly explaining his (supposedly) 'method' acting in nightclub queues. Clarissa Mayhew reads English at St John's. She looks forward to having intimidating bookshelves by the end of the degree. Daniel Kodsi reads PPE at Balliol. He hadn't heard of T. S. Eliot until last week. Daniel Sutton reads Ancient and Modern History at St John's. He likes a steady diet of Classical literature and chocolate cookies.

Contributors Ellie Duncan reads English at St Hugh's. As well as books, she enjoys the simple things in life, like hash browns and gin.

John Maier reads PPE at Balliol. He is a man of letters, particularly the letter ‘t’, which he uses at every opportunity.

Ethan Croft reads History at Hertford. He can't ride a bicycle. As a child, he ate lemons whole to upset his family.

Katie Mennis reads Classics & English at Magdalen. She is also an internationally acclaimed but unappreciated Spotify DJ.

Gaby Mancey-Jones reads French at Magdalen, and is really hungover right now, so be gentle please and thank you.

Visiting student Laela Zaidi reads Theology and Religion at St Peter's. She is proud to have never been stung by a bee.

Hugo Murphy reads English at Magdalen. He drinks at least six litres of fizzy water a day.

Niloo Sharifi is an aggressively sincere English Literature graduate from Oxford who has never vaped and never will.

Jem Bossata reads French and German at St Catherine's. He can usually be found floating around Europe with his guitar. Jess Brown reads English, the backs of shampoo bottles and sometimes minds.

Oliver Bealby-Wright reads English at Magdalen. He loves his greyhound, Jasper. So does Andrew Mitchell. Oliver doesn't love Andrew Mitchell.

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Founding Editors: Daniel Kodsi Katie Mennis Benn Sheridan

Editors:

Benjamin Davies John Maier

Sub-editors:

Jess Brown Ellie Duncan Susie Finlay Nina Sandelson Laela Zaidi

Artistic Director: Hope Sutherland

Graphic Designer: William Nelson

Artistic Team:

Poppy Eastwood Mateusz Diak Louise Tidmarsh

Events and Marketing: Anna Watkinson Ellie Gomes

Cover:

Hope Sutherland

Special thanks to: Darius Sanai Laurence Heyworth Josephine Pepper Stephen Hawes

Susie Finlay reads History and French at Queen's. She has a penchant for kitsch Soviet propaganda and pickled gherkins. Toby Clyde is an English student and Londoner. He likes various things, particularly people who read magazine biography sections. Annie Hayter reads English at Brasenose. She is still sour about being given Friar Lawrence instead of Romeo in Year 6. Mary Anne Clark studies English at Merton College, where she won the 2016 Newdigate Prize. Simon Armitage enjoys writing poems and people seem to like them. He's currently the Oxford Professor of Poetry. Dominic Fraser Leonard reads English at Christ Church. He was a Foyle Young Poet in 2015 for 10 minutes.

For a long time, an entire childhood in fact, we wondered where the countryside actually was, or even if it really existed.

he village of Ash, not far from Dartford in north-west Kent, has a suitably apocalyptic kind of name. Ash is an ordinary English hamlet, tending to the obscure – its Wikipedia entry has only three lines. It is not even the most prominent settlement called Ash in its own county. It contains a parish church, a few houses and farms, a golf club and, of course, a caveman. It was here that Clive King set his classic 1962 children’s book Stig of the Dump, a story about a boy who, exploring a chalk quarry near his grandmother’s house, finds and befriends Stig, a survivor apparently from the Neolithic era. The pair’s various adventures include repairing the roof of Stig’s den with jam jars and vacuum cleaner parts, saving a fox from the Boxing Day hunt and raising a standing stone on the top of the North Downs. King’s novel has aged well in its likeable humour, liberal social attitudes and playful anti-establishment disposition, that is, in all respects but one: very few British children growing up in the 21st century would ever be allowed anything like the license to roam that Barney enjoys, the time and space to wander the countryside, get into scrapes, stung by nettles, or find cavemen, without ceaseless adult supervision. Stig exits on the margins, and, overlooked by all save Barney, comes to embody the landscape he roams – wild, tangled, unpretty. Slowly though, we come to understand that, treated with attention and understanding, Stig provides access to something magical, something truly extraordinary: an understanding of the natural world that gives a deep poetry to the familiar, domesticated landscape of the Home Counties. Stig, then, is a quintessential creation of the ‘edgelands’, the liminal, overlooked zones halfway between town and country – quarries reclaimed by vegetation, canals deserted by the trade they were built to promote, motorway embankments, brownfield sites, scrubby suburban woodlands, pylons, pallets. They are a world away from the experiences eulogised and elegised by the writers more immediately associated with the British landscape – Wordsworth and his supposedly unspoilt Lake District, its ‘awful’ crags and ‘sublime’ vistas; Edward Thomas’ paths and hedges tinged with melancholy, or the darker energies of Ted Hughes’s rain-battered Yorkshire Dales. There is barely an inch of English countryside that hasn’t been artistically represented in some way, and yet this creative attention has a double effect, both eye-opening and blinkering. The best of these artists offer new ways of seeing a landscape, but such repetitive study is all too easily numbed by cliché – the ‘whaleback’ hills, or ‘vivid’ sunsets. This dulls our sight rather than making us see anew. But edgelands are a blank slate. These landscapes are paradoxically defined by our lack of attention to them, spaces glimpsed from the train window or hurried through at dusk, not often the subject of art or poetry as almost every other aspect of the British landscape has been. Yet, slowly but surely, the edgelands are entering the national consciousness.

On the Edge of Wonder Christopher Page In the wake of the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords, we must appreciate the fragments of nature at the fringe of our urban consciousness – through the literary landscape of edgelands. In film, photography, poetry and prose, the overlooked rural-urban fringes have recently found themselves in sharp focus. Perhaps the first to discover, or reclaim, the edgelands were the psychogeographers – writers like Iain Sinclair and, latterly, Nick Papadimitriou – whose works are characterised by a species of close historical and geographical attention to marginal spaces, and the compulsive linking of seemingly disparate spaces, concepts and events. Reading Sinclair’s 2002 London Orbital, which documents a journey on foot loosely following the M25 ‘to find out where it leads’, is like having your vision inverted. Suddenly, the transit zones through which one has passed a thousand times, the underpasses and concrete bridges, cat’s eyes and field verges are thrumming with layers of history, seething with half-forgotten memories and bursting with wild flowers. A light is switched on and a whole swathe of Britain is uncovered right beneath our noses. And many other artists, across different media, bring a similar vision-altering quality to the edgelands environment. The films of Patrick Keiller infuse the fields, waste ground, and industrial sites of England with an eerie, poetic significance. Beauty is found where previously none could be seen; and this in turn encourages attentiveness, and an awareness of the fragility and flux in which all landscape exists – surely valuable qualities in a century of unprecedented environmental degradation. Children’s literature has, of course, always revelled in the overlooked, and, as such, has found a fitting venue in the unsupervised edgeland landscape. Think Brendon Chase by ‘BB’ (real name Denys Watkins-Pitchford), the 1944 story of three brothers who go feral, and live for months in a den in the titular woodland, trapping squirrels and fish for food, evading capture and wearing animal skins. The heroes of this book return to nature, and to their own nature as creatures of the wild woods. Yet these woods are very much edgeland: a feral space defined by human interaction with it, rather than an ancient fairytale forest. Brendon Chase itself, then, is an ordinary patch of English woodland made extraordinary by the attention and love the brothers give it. They reclaim it from its marginal status just as Sinclair’s walks attempt to reclaim suburban London. Nature here is not merely a picturesque backdrop: it is something to be engaged with viscerally, sometimes harsh and minatory, never simple or easy to understand. And though some of BB’s protagonists’ activities – trapping rare butterflies and ransacking bird’s nests – are ‘to a modern sensibility’, in Philip Pullman’s phrase, ‘worse than advocating hard drugs’, still the overwhelming sensation one takes away from

Brendon Chase is one of joy, of rediscovered delight in the natural world, and beauty in unexpected places. As Robert Macfarlane notes, in his essential 2015 study of the imaginative state of the British landscape, Landmarks, we are losing our natural vocabulary. This issue made the headlines earlier that same year, when the Oxford Junior English Dictionary removed dozens of words associated with the natural world from their updated edition, replacing them with the terminology of the virtual and the electronic – ‘attachment’ for ‘acorn’, ‘broadband’ for ‘buttercup’. Macfarlane was one of 28 prominent authors, including Andrew Motion and Margaret Atwood to warn, in an open letter, of the dangers of this decision. But of course, as noted by an OUP

spokesperson after the controversy, ‘dictionaries are designed to reflect language as it is used’. Certainly, landscape-literacy and natureknowledge are at an all-time low, with only 10 per cent of children regularly playing in natural areas and a staggering 40 per cent of children, according to a 2012 National Trust survey, ‘never playing outdoors’. Barney’s modern-day equivalents would likely be found not in the overgrown chalk-pit that Stig calls home, but another North Kent chalk quarry: Bluewater, home to Europe’s sixth-largest shopping centre. Strangely, these warnings come at a time when British writing about landscape and the natural world has never been more popular. The so-called ‘New Nature Writing’ boom has propelled writers like Helen Macdonald, Robert Macfarlane and Patrick Barkham to (relative) literary stardom. We seem to be grasping for greater involvement in the natural world just as we appear in danger of losing it forever. In August 2016, a think tank attached to the International Geological Congress suggested that humanity’s impact on Earth’s environment was so profound that a new geological era needed to be declared – the Anthropocene, the era of the human. In such an era, historical modes of thought on place and landscape, ideas of the ‘pastoral’, the ‘natural’ and the ‘wild’ (as a synonym for ‘unspoiled’ or ‘unaffected by human action’), are fundamentally troubled. In many cases, they become inadequate to describing the interaction of people and landscape in the 21st century. And certainly, the Romantic pastoral feels a world away from Helen Macdonald’s startlingly dark, emotionally punishing account of attempting to train a goshawk in H is for Hawk (2014), or Amy Liptrot’s remarkable The Outrun (2015), which details the author’s battle with alcohol addiction in the context of her move back to

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a family croft in the Orkney Islands. Here, nature is far from the picturesque or purely therapeutic – it engages with people in strange, unpredictable ways. Its insights are chastening as well comforting, and its coexistence with humanity is troubled and uneasy. Clearly, art and literature alone will not halt what is the greatest crisis in the history of humanity: that of climate change, unsustainable growth and environmental destruction. But they can, at least, draw attention to that which we risk losing. In this grim context, the new kind of work being produced by young British nonfiction writers does something exceptionally important, in helping to reenergise our intellectual and emotional relationship to nature and the landscape spaces we inhabit. Nature, in the view of the best of these new authors, is not something out there, a great sublime system into which humans can barely hope to intrude. But it acts on, and in, lived human lives in a multitude of unstraightforward ways, both consciously and unconsciously. The edgeland landscape acts as physical signifier for this kind of writing – newly ‘discovered’ and defiantly post-pastoral, but still premised on the idea that in representing something or somewhere, one can more fully understand its value.

The Anthropocene is here to stay. Britain is one of the few nations hitting its pledged emission targets – but even if every nation, developed and developing, were to adhere to their Paris Convention on Climate Change reductions (from which the Trump administration has just withdrawn), the Earth’s temperature would still rise by over 2°C – enough to cause catastrophic flooding and widespread desertification and famine. On the 19th May this year, news broke that the Global Seed Vault, a repository of the world’s plant life buried deep within a Spitsbergen mountain in Svalbard, and designed to be essentially apocalypse-proof, had partially flooded due to melting permafrost. Scott Pruitt, the new head of America’s Environmental Protection Agency, is a known climate change sceptic. Stig’s chalk pit is now a golf course. In the face of such a crisis, merely attempting to find new systems of thought, or a newer and more flexible natural aesthetic, can seem futile. But increasing appreciation of nature not only as something far away (pandas, penguins, or polar bears), but as a phenomenon rich and present throughout our familiar daily lives – in train stations, pockets of suburban woodland, grass-roots pushing through the cracks in the pavement – encourages a fuller awareness of that which we all stand to lose this century. Only through loving nature can we possibly care enough to take action to save it, and edgelands, and the writers and artists who have portrayed them, encourage us to pay attention to, and to love, the local and specific. They reinvest us with the vocabulary to articulate, to truly look at what we see around us; and enable a newly childlike wonder at the things we see. And wonder is the first step toward action. 

ast West Street was not what I anticipated. I expected a work of popular academia – ‘on the origins of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity”’, the cover reads – one of those works that tries to straddle the line between rigour and accessibility. But Philippe Sands’ new book, last year’s winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, defies such categorisation. The thoroughly investigated story of four men – Rafael Lemkin, Hersch Lauterpacht, Hans Frank and Leon Buchholz – it is part legal history, part detective story. Its two main protaganists, Lemkin and Lauterpacht, were the legal scholars responsible for originating the concepts that emerged in the summer of 1945: the former for ‘genocide’, and the latter for ‘crimes against humanity’. Frank, the Nazi party's chief lawyer and governor of Poland, was directly implicated in the acts themselves. Leon was the author’s grandfather, and the only one of more than seventy family members to survive the Holocaust. Through some accident of fate, all of these men passed through Lviv, a Ukranian city whose geography is alluded to in the title of the book.

Two Kinds of Murder Daniel Kodsi What is the history behind ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’? Philippe Sands, acclaimed author of the award-winning East West Street, speaks with the ORB about the concepts and the problems they cause.

‘The book was an accident too’, Philippe Sands tells me, as we sit down in a café near University College London, where Sands is a professor of law. ‘That’s the first thing to make clear. I didn’t set out to write a book.’ It was only after arriving in Lviv, where he had been invited to lecture, that he came across the ‘peculiar coincidence that the origins of crimes against humanity and genocide are located in the city’. East West Street explores ‘two stories. One is a personal, family story; the other is a big story about the history of international law’. Its intent is, Sands says, is to investigate a ‘central dichotomy: the relation between the individual and the group’. This difference is mirrored in the contrast between the legal concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide. While the former protects individuals as individuals, the latter protects them as members of groups. Both prosecute crimes with international scope or which threaten interests the international community has deemed important (this is why the systematic murder of a particular national subgroup qualifies as an international crime even if it does not have international effects). If a Bond supervillain were to pick an arbitrary million people across the world to murder, this would constitute a crime against humanity, but would not be genocide, which requires the intention to kill to destroy a group in whole or in part. Interestingly, although the term ‘genocide’ has captured the public’s imagination in situations like the Holocaust, it was not mentioned in the judgement at the Nuremberg trials. According to legal academics at the time, including Cambridge professor Hersch Lauterpacht, it was a gerrymandered concept with little basis in existing law. It was only through the efforts of the relentless Lemkin – which, Sands says, were a ‘lesson in the power of lobbying’ – that ‘genocide’ came to have the legal status it does today. If the distinction between genocide and crimes against humanity is easy to spell out, it is harder to judge which works better as a criminal charge. Indeed, their implications differ greatly. Sands tells me that he wanted his readers to ask themselves: ‘Am I an individual or am I a member of the group, and on what basis do I want the law to protect me? Do I want it to protect me because of my individual qualities as a human being or because I happen to be a member of a group?’ Lemkin and Lauterpacht, who were both Jewish and studied in the same classroom at the University of Lviv, came to opposite conclusions. For Lauterpacht, the individual was the ultimate unit of the law; it would be a mistake, if not flatly incoherent with established legal principles, to prosecute for the destruction of groups. But Lemkin saw things differently. For him, Sands says, ‘the destruction of the human being was offensive because it contributed to the destruction of a culture, and that was what he wanted to protect’. Lemkin was so devoted to this that he

described the day of the Nuremberg judgement as the blackest day of his life. ‘Worse’, Sands says, ‘than the day he learnt about the deaths of his own parents and family members’. When creating new laws, it is important to consider not only whether they're necessary but also how natural it is to include them in legal statutes. Clearly it is necessary that some law prosecutes for the murder of people who happen to be 6'3" and taller, but it should be a law which prosecutes for the murder of anyone – not just those taller than 6'3". But what makes it so difficult to decide between ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’ is that both seem to cut at moral joints. The former is reminiscent of the liberalism which pervades our culture. It sees the individual as of paramount importance and values her as such, regardless of race or creed. To many scholars, I imagine, this is ideologically irresistible: because the concept treats all persons as individuals, it also treats each person as equal. It is a law which protects all human beings as human beings, not as members of a particular religious or ethnic group. This must have been what Lauterpacht believed, and from the perspective of theory it is clear why. In contrast, genocide evokes an almost visceral horror. What seems monstrously wrong about the Holocaust, at least to me, is not only that millions were killed, but that millions of Jews were killed. The Holocaust was an atrocity that happened to a particular people, who were singled out for being members of a specific community. That Jews were killed for being Jews, and not individuals, is an important fact about the Holocaust that ‘crimes against humanity’ seems to fail to capture. Sands himself finds himself torn between the two schools of thought, telling me that ‘it became clear as I went along that whilst intellectually, I was closer to Lauterpacht, I found it impossible to escape my own tribal connections and so I

find myself in a place of essential contradiction between my head and my heart’. But there is a serious, and potentially destructive, argument against incorporating genocide into the law. The most eloquent summary of it, Sands says, is given by Leopold Kohr, a friend of Lemkin. In a private letter Kohr wrote that focusing on groups rather than individuals, ‘even if it does not always end in Hitler, leads to him’. The concern, as Sands puts it, is that ‘once you begin to focus on group identity in constructing legal concepts and rules, you tend to create a framework that reinforces group and tribal identity’. In cementing group solidarity one might further inter-group division as well. More generally, we might call this the legal paradox of multiculturalism. In the same way that someone who seeks happiness most ardently is the least likely to find it, laws which are intended to protect groups, through enshrining their difference in a statute, end up harming them instead. This is a particular variation of what Sands has come to see as a lesson of his own experience of legal life. Every law has unintended consequences. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919, he says, was one such law: ‘possibly one of the worst international treaties ever adopted’. The lesser known, but similarly problematic ‘Little Treaty of Versailles’ was signed the same year. It granted Poland independence on the condition that the government would protect its minorities. But, Sands says, the treaty ‘created backlash because all of a sudden, the Germans, the Jews and other minorities have the right to go off to an international court and complain that their rights are being violated, but the Poles have no such rights’. When it comes to genocide, Sands worries that ‘it might tend to reinforce, as a legal concept, the very conditions that give rise to the horrors the concept seeks to solve’. It is important, I think, to distinguish between two distinct claims at work here: that laws have unintended consequences, and that it can be

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very dangerous to emphasise group identity. Highlighting identity amounts to highlighting difference; whether this is done in law or not is largely immaterial. A more general paradox of multiculturalism underlies the legal one – when a group tries to protect itself, it can often make its situation yet more precarious. This happens in two steps. First, construing identities in terms of groups has the consequence of breeding prejudice. And second, because the group finds itself under threat, it rallies together. This is the notion behind racial solidarity: some African Americans have long felt that in order to achieve justice it was necessary to exhibit racial pride. Pressure crystallises identity. But if it is true that emphasising one’s identity necessarily causes animosity, then a vicious circle emerges. A group is threatened, so its members close ranks. This in turn cements division between them and others. The cycle repeats, each time worse. It is impossible to ignore how readily this point is borne out by the xenophobia and nationalism that seems to be sweeping much of the Western world. The resonance of the themes in East West Street with events happening in the United Kingdom, Sands thinks, might account in large part for the book’s success. There are two parallels that he notes. The first of these is that ‘Britain is moving into a place in which people want to take back “control”. And taking back “control” is the phrase that, essentially, the Germans and the National Socialists ran with in the context of a situation in which outsiders were constraining their freedom from action, and when a country begins to declaim the need to take back control and to remove the shackles of international constraint, whether it’s Theresa May or Donald Trump, I worry, because I think that leads to potentially very dangerous places.’ He also highlights the remarkable rolereversal between Britain and the United States on the one hand and Germany on the other. ‘The two countries that did more than any to put effort into creating the 1945 system’, Sands observes, ‘are now turning their backs on that settlement, and the country the settlement was intended to constrain, Germany, has become a beacon of liberal democracy arguing in favour of that settlement. My instinct is that the new positions adopted by the UK and US are deeply worrisome.’ The other contemporary resonance ties in more explicitly with the phenomenon of racial backlash. It is to the law of unintended consequences that Sands attributes at least some responsibility for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. ‘We’ve seen that right now in the United States’, Sands says, ‘with the rise of the concept of “America First”, the allegation there’s been too much [political correctness], too much protection of various groups. What these laws have done… is give rise to a modern form of identity politics, and that’s what we’re living through now. That’s one of the reasons why Britain voted for Brexit; that’s why America voted for Trump.’ The rise of ‘America First’ can better be described as the return of ‘America First’. The slogan is the same as that which was used by the anti-Semite and Nazi sympathiser Charles Lindbergh. Similar, and usually worse, rhetoric was deployed against Jews in the United States in the 1930’s as is being advanced against immigrants and Muslims today. Several very difficult questions seem to emerge from these considerations. If the concept of genocide is counterproductive and the ‘identity politics’ of the left has been co-opted, to far more deleterious effect, by the right, then should we be concerned more broadly with laws that seek to protect groups? If it is true, as Sands says, that such laws might reinforce a certain ‘psychological element’ at play in how members of one group perceive members of another, is the project of legislating against racial and religious hate misguided? To fully explore the implications of these worries, let us suppose that the project is in fact ill-conceived – that any laws which explicitly mention race, religion (or gender, sexuality, and so on) are

necessarily harmful. Also, keeping in mind that laws are not the only way of furthering intergroup tension, let us suppose that to fully dissolve the problem we must ignore group identity entirely, efface it from our minds (or at least practical deliberations). In doing this, we arrive at a world where no group animosity exists, because no one pays attention to their group identity. But this seems dystopic. Communitarianism, an influential criticism of liberalism, holds that liberal theorists fail to properly account for the important role that one’s community plays in one’s life. Regardless of whether this is the case, it does seem intuitive that the identity of each one of us is constituted by our group identities. I have no conception of myself that does not depend on being a Jew, a New Yorker, my parents’ son and my siblings’ brother. If the way to eliminate persecution, animosity and division is to cease identifying as members of groups, is that a price worth paying? This reasoning leads to a dilemma. The individuating aspects of subgroups must be whittled away or intergroup

t some point in your childhood, at a museum or circus perhaps, you will have seen a zoetrope. A zoetrope is one of those hollow cylinders with slits around the edge, and a series of images inside. Spin it, peer through the slits, and watch a horse gallop, or windmill turn. Unlike when seeing real horses run or real windmills turn, the zoetrope implicates your eye in the illusion that a few different images constitute a whole story. According to one sometime Deputy Prime Minister, political careers now work like zoetropes. What we see and remember of politicians is like a small set of stills: the rise, manic popularity and crowds, the decisions, the protests, the bombproof vehicles, the resignation, the disgrace. I speak to Nick Clegg by phone on the day of Parliament’s dissolution for the 2017 General Election. ‘I have a terrible confession to make,’ he says. ‘I find, on the whole, books by politicians… absolutely insufferable.’ He must be finding 2016/17 so far unbearable, and not only because he holds the unenviable position of Liberal Democrat EU spokesperson. In 2016, we had Clegg’s Politics Between the Extremes, Ed Balls’ Speaking Out and David Laws’ Coalition (all out this year in paperback). This year has seen the release of traditional memoirs by veteran MPs Harriet Harman and Ken Clarke; Everywoman by Jess Phillips (2017); and the conclusion of Alan Johnson’s acclaimed memoir series with a third instalment, The Long and Winding Road (2017). Meanwhile, Unleashing Demons from ex-PR man Craig Oliver, is an intimate account of the EU referendum campaign. Had enough yet? David Cameron and George Osborne don’t think so – they will release their own books before year's end. Just over a week before Theresa May’s election announcement, I visit Laws, a former MP, at the Education Policy Institute in Westminster. It is the day of PC Keith Palmer’s funeral, and the streets around the Institute, opposite the Ministry of Justice, feel quiet. It is the atmosphere of a slow day suited to somber reflection of the kind Laws probably wants to achieve with Coalition. ‘I wanted the book to be quite historical’, Laws tells me in a conference room at the Institute, where he is now Executive Chairman. He wears dark blue trousers and a white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and sits with one arm over the back of his chair. Laws is not your typical household name, but was one of the most senior Lib Dems in the 2010 to 2015 coalition government, and a close friend and confidant of Clegg. He was sometimes present at meetings of ‘the Quad’, the most powerful and central decision-making group in the coalition. At over 600 pages, Coalition must be among the lengthiest political memoirs of recent

conflict, in some form or other, is destined to continue in a genuinely multicultural society. Either a country must give up cultural diversity or national unity. Naturally this conclusion must be qualified. Even if the dilemma holds, it is possible that over time racial and ethnic tension could subside (as, in reality, it often does). But it is misleading to think of ethnic identity, for instance, as contstituing cultural identity. This is only a contingent fact of our society, although surely an unfortunate one which contributes to friction between groups. Rather, the problem presented by the paradox is that it is hard to see how substantively different cultures – ones which differ not only in skin colour or cuisine but also their conception of the good – could coexist without conflict. The real question, I think, is whether members of two groups – like religions – which have vastly different identities can peacefully share some public space. Do we need to scrub ourselves of our cultural identifications in order to get along? And if so, then what is it of value that we lose thereby?

For Sands, writing East West Street was about more than just the conflict between the liberalism of crimes against humanity and the multiculturalism of genocide. One of the other central lessons of the book, he tells me, ‘is that you cannot understand significant historical moments without unpicking the personal lives of the individuals who drove those moments’. Although this seems dangerously close to the Great Man theory of history, I do not think that is what Sands meant. It seems likely that even if Lauterpacht and Lemkin had not made their contributions to the law, a similar, if not identical, international system would still have emerged. The post-war climate was inclined to punishment: victor’s justice would have been had without Lauterpacht or Lemkin. Rather, Sands means that understanding the present system, and understanding history as it did in fact develop, requires examining the lives of those who shaped it. Personal history might not have determined intellectual history, but it is an important aspect of understanding it.

And of course, writing the book was intensely personal for Sands as well. It is clear that in tracing the story of his grandfather, he learnt much more than he could have anticipated. The story of Leon Buchholz is a fascinating one – I could not help thinking that the pages of East West Street contained a Milan Kundera novel waiting to be written. And in unpacking the lives of Leon, Hans Frank, Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, Sands found himself increasingly at ease with his own identity – his own understanding of himself. Not a practicing Jew, but culturally and socially Jewish, Sands tells me that as he wrote the book he found himself ‘increasingly comfortable being rather open about’ his own Judaism, which ‘growing up in England, that sense of groupal identity, it’s not buried but it’s not something you wear on your sleeve. I mean, we all have multiple identities, and that is a part of my identity. It is not my only identity or my defining identity, but it is something that is there.’ 

Mr Clegg's Zoetrope Benjamin Davies Speaking out: Lessons in Life and Politics Ed Balls, Arrow Books, 2017

Politics Between the Extremes Nick Clegg, Vintage, 2017

Coalition David Laws, Biteback, 2017

In interviews with the ORB, Nick Clegg talks toys, Ed Balls comes to terms with recent history, and we all find ourselves wondering why we should read political books. times. I find myself relieved to be reading it in paperback. It might have needed a more thorough editor – some passages are repeated, events revisited – but covering every year of the coalition, as Laws tries to do, justifies the length. His unspectacular and candid prose ensures that Coalition warrants that most ordinary of book descriptions: it is readable.

I call Ed Balls eight days before the election. The news has gone into a frenzy about Corbyn announcing he will debate on the BBC that evening. Balls, once a cabinet minister, then Shadow Chancellor, now ex-MP, is now involved in a different, much gentler campaign: promoting his Speaking Out, recently gone to paperback.

But ‘quite’ historical? There’s revealing unease in the wording. For anybody wary of politicians telling stories, Coalition ends up being difficult to grapple with. The hyperbolic book jacket endorsements expose some weaknesses. Chris Mullin calls it ‘forensic’. For both Mullin and former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown, it is the ‘definitive account’ of the coalition. (Neither Mullin nor Ashdown were MPs by 2010). Laws tells me Clegg has read the book, so I ask Clegg for his assessment? The reply: ‘“forensic”. I wonder if they all just mean “very long”’. Because Coalition swings between great factual detail and a much more anecdotal tone. I ask Laws about the sources. He says he worked from an audio diary kept every day of the government. This explains the conversations recounted – purportedly – verbatim, including when special advisor Dominic Cummings calls David Cameron a ‘complete muppet’, and George Bush Jr. calls Raul Castro ‘a total prick’. Nonetheless, Laws relies on swathes of reported speech so suspiciously large that calling the book ‘forensic’ feels overgenerous.

‘I thought it was too early’, he says ‘to write … an intellectual, definitive book about a period of history.’ Instead, Speaking Out follows Politics, its near contemporary, in doing away with chronological, ‘definitive’ narrative. There are as many chapters called things like ‘Defeat’ or ‘Ambition’ as there are dealing with ‘Markets’ or ‘Opposition’. At its best, Balls’ writing seems

‘That’s not the kind of book I could or would write’, Clegg tells me. ‘I don’t really think it can even be dignified with the label of a “memoir”’. Instead, Politics is arranged thematically. The chapters have names like ‘The Virtue of Compromise’, and ‘History, Grievance and Psychodrama’. It’s an approach that could flop in the hands of others, but Clegg has a deft intellectualism that gives his writing vitality. Most of the time, he achieves parallel discussion of abstract concepts and policy without being too vague or resorting to lazy sloganising, and makes interesting use of European and international political references.

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honest and relaxed, but at worst, feels like the stuff of generic self-help books (‘the reality is none of us are perfect … But the more honest you are with yourself and other people about the struggles you face, the easier you’ll find them to cope with’). When addressing politics specifically, Balls seems quite genuine and open. The move away from the traditional memoir model won’t please all readers – David Laws, for one. He didn’t think Balls’ was a bad book, but tells me: ‘I was very disappointed in it if it’s the only thing he’s going to write’. He claims that, deep down, Balls is a policy geek after the style of Thatcher-era chancellor Nigel Lawson. Lawson’s doorstopper The View from No. 11 (1992) ran to over 1000 pages. Balls, says Laws rather imposingly, ‘has got within himself, and ought to produce, that sort of seriousness’. Balls himself begins our call by asserting that he won’t comment on the books of others, then reneges. He seems cautious about notions of ‘seriousness’, saying: ‘My sense about David Laws is it’s all about an agenda, and attempting to produce a view of the past.’ Balls’ and Clegg’s books have intense and constantly self-acknowledged subjectivities which succeed in messing with the zoetrope model by making their authors seem complex – a zoetrope doesn’t work if the images are incongruous. But the opportunity cost of their brevity is the characterisation of others. Laws’ book manages to negotiate a more moderate approach, particularly with senior

Conservatives, and it is often only by taking all three books together that we seem to get a realistic picture. Cameron is characterised variously as ‘never really … a man for policy detail’, and ‘at his worst on the small issues and … at his best on the really big, nonpolitical issues’. He appears obsessed with party management and nervously throwing ‘red meat’ to Tory backbenchers. I ask Laws to reflect on Cameron’s image, and he reels off negative traits (‘very petulant … liked to get his own way’), and says that in the book he ‘didn’t make a big effort to bring these characteristics out.’ Yet, I notice that the closing chapters of Coalition say that Cameron ‘will be regarded by historians as a good Prime Minister’, and ask Laws if, following the EU referendum, he wants to reassess. No, he doesn’t. He thinks that conclusion will ‘stand the test of time’. Osborne comes across differently. In Coalition, he is ‘self-deprecating, relaxed and amusing’. Laws and Clegg both prefer him to Cameron, with the latter saying: ‘in private, [Osborne] is mischievous, gossipy, and thoughtful’. Even Balls paints him as ‘friendly and civil.’ But there are flashes of deep deceit. Laws, recalling discussions about spending targets, quotes Osborne saying with sincerity: ‘£25 billion and £33 billion are pretty similar. We can just fudge that a bit’. Of his cuts in savings tax, he admits they ‘will only really be of help to stupid, affluent and lazy people’. Cameron and Osborne have been slow at producing their own books, both of which will be published by William Collins. Osborne’s is provisionally titled The Age of Unreason. I recall this as the exact phrase used in a section of Clegg’s book, and mention it to him. He says – only half-jokingly – ‘It’s a brazen act of plagiarism in my view. In fact, I initially proposed that title. It was a working title for my book.’ The softer portrait of Osborne in all three books combined with his publisher’s promotional line that Age of Unreason will be a ‘rallying cry to save capitalism, western democracy and to map our future course towards a fairer society’, make the book sound like Politics Between the Extremes. ‘Who knows?’ says Clegg. ‘Maybe much to my surprise … there’s an inner liberal struggling to get out of George Osborne’s very conservative exterior.’ It is testament to Osborne’s youth and tremendous ambition that quitting parliament has somehow not quashed the possibility of his one day becoming PM. The adoption of the non-memoir approach may be following a growing trend in political writing, but it will be hard not to look at Age of Unreason without seeing looming behind it the book-not-written. Nonetheless, we will have to wait some time for that book. Confession is not the mode of a politician still hovering in the wings, banking on one more big moment onstage. Clegg and Balls give near-identical answers when I ask them about Cameron’s forthcoming, untitled memoirs – how will he navigate deciding what kind of book to write? ‘I’m assuming’, says Clegg, ‘he will feel a pressure … [to] somehow conform to a kind of convention’. Trying to write a book about one’s premiership, says Balls, might involve ‘an obligation to feel complete, or to try and reach balanced conclusions’. The publicity from William Collins says that Cameron’s book will be ‘frank’. ‘Don’t all publishers use that adjective?’ asks Clegg when I bring this up. ‘“Revealing”, you know, “never before seen”, all that kind of stuff’.

propriety. In Politics, Clegg writes that some big political figures strike him as ‘more … lonesome than the public might expect’, and one suspects this may apply to Cameron. Balls writes that Cameron, in contrast to any other MP, when passing him in the House, would ‘just stare ahead, or look at his papers or his phone’ – even after resigning as PM. Apart from a recent campaign visit to Crewe, Cameron has been keeping behind closed doors at dinners or international finance conferences. Perhaps, post-referendum, he doesn’t have many allies or even amicable acquaintances in the Commons. A truly ‘frank’ memoir from him would be a great political book, but, for such a calculating politician, the price may be too much to trade in one’s last friends in Westminster. ‘Remember this too’, Hemingway implored the reader of Death in the Afternoon (1932): ‘all bad writers are in love with the epic.’ Could such a lovesickness spread to readers too? There’s something striking about being in thrall to the prospect of the comprehensive, sprawling beast of the ‘epic’ traditional memoir, something addictive about second-guessing that such a book lies dormant in every politician. And so books like Speaking Out and Politics Between the Extremes have a sobering effect. As experimentations with new forms, they are not flawless, but are nonetheless refreshing and forward-looking, and drag readers away from the fixation with the way that big memoirs fossilise their authors. ‘I’ve just turned 50’ says Clegg buoyantly: ‘I’ve still got oodles of energy.’ The books are also not devoid of great titbits. In Speaking Out, these mostly involve Gordon Brown. For example, when Brown invites Balls into his office, shows him a whiteboard full of cabinet positions, and asks him to pick one, as one might ask a child to pick confectionary. Or when, in 2002, a Concorde carrying both men nearly crashes. They had been drafting a speech for the IMF and World Bank, and after one engine fails and the plane begins to plummet, Brown turns to Balls and says: ‘What do you think? Should we finish my speech?’ Laws’ Coalition, despite shortcomings, is enjoyable for casual readers and political anoraks alike. For the latter, particularly, there are some nice confirmations of overlongsuspected and embarrassing political truths. ‘Minister,’ says one senior civil servant to Laws: ‘immigration has never really been a priority for the Home Office.’ ‘We’ll do whatever it takes’, says Cameron to Clegg, ‘to stay in power’. Reading more and more of these books, I start to reformulate what I take issue with: it’s not that any one book fails to be comprehensive – that just seems unavoidable. It’s that, as group, they still lack certain voices. Harriet Harman’s A Woman’s Work, a powerful book, articulates this most clearly in its acknowledgements: ‘I’d always denounced political memoirs as male vanity projects’, she says, ‘and vowed never to write mine’. Fortunately, she wrote a sorely needed one. But there is a welcome anxiety – sometimes, even humility – to the new, slimmer volumes of Clegg and Balls. To begin with zoetrope as the foundational metaphor is to begin with pluralism, and encourages scepticism and curiosity sufficient to the tremendous chaos of the political circus. 

Frankness might be difficult for Cameron. ‘David’s a lovely person’, Laws recalls Ken Clarke saying, ‘but I have no idea at all what he stands for.’ His enemies called it populism, his allies called it pragmatism, but all knew Cameron was a ducking-and-weaving politician for whom frankness was either a rhetorical tool or something to be avoided – certainly never, as it seems to be for Corbyn, a default way of talking, a way to bring strong ideology to all interactions. There is also the problem of

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Dustsceawung

Dominic Fraser Leonard out of the damaged Old English behold this wall of stone wasted by fate the constructions of giants crumble in a fallen city buckled ceilings are strewn to the ground towers stumble the broken door is stubborn with frost this torn fallen roof a shelter from the storm eaten by time though dead and gone the master builders are still locked in the earth in the fierce clutch of the earth until a hundred generations are gone this wall made grey with lichen and russetcrusted has always endured kingdom after kingdom has survived the blaze tall and vast it collapses still it stands mindblasted fell on fiercely sharpened shone she beautiful ancient building crust of mud ring spirit the brilliant creator weaved quickly a design of rings to fasten the wall supports together with wondrous wires the buildings of the city were so bright so many bath houses so many towering gabled structures the great din of warriors sounds of happiness filling the countless meadhalls until all of that was transformed ruined by fate everywhere the slaughtered fell the days of pestilence came death took all the brave men away the standing city turned to scraps the rebuilders and the armies fell to the earth then the buildings were abandoned and the curved red roof tore away from the tiles of the domed city it fell ruined to the ground shattered into rubble where many men before happy in their hearts goldbright adorned with splendour full to the brim with pride and wine shining in their war ornaments looked over treasure and silver and beautiful gems over that shining city in the wide kingdom buildings of stone remained the spring cast out hot water a great swell the wall enclosed it entirely in its bright breast where the baths were steaming hot it was perfect then they let the surge free the hot water gushed over the grey stone un ntil the hot spiralling pool

there were the baths

this is

it is a beautiful thing

home home

n 1960, three years before the first cassette tape was invented, a group of Japanese architects calling themselves ‘Metabolists’ produced a manifesto, which outlined a series of goals for society. In one section, they made an especially bold prediction: ‘Everyone will have a brain wave receiver’ in his ear, which conveys directly and exactly what other people think about him and vice versa…There is no more individual consciousness, only the will of mankind as a whole.’ That same decade, UCLA academic F.M. Esfandiary would rename himself FM-2030 and begin lecturing on the advent of ‘Transhumanism’, computer scientist Marvin Minsky would outline the complementary roles of AI and the human mind, and Iron Man would enter the Marvel Universe.

Humanity 2.0 Daniel Sutton Artificial intelligence and technological entrepreneurism is now outpacing science fiction – so why are there still some qualities that elude the computer's reach?

Musk and Penrose are hardly alone in understanding the brain as a calculating mechanism. Even our moral decisions, although typically made intuitively, are often expressed in quantitative terms: a utilitarian calculus, Pareto superior outcomes, distributive justice. But this model does not reflect the nature of human ingenuity. When Penrose set out to create his puzzle, he cannot have worked through the 10121 positions in any logical order: he surely gathered enough information to imagine how a supercomputer would try to solve a given puzzle, then matched up features it would typically struggle with. He demonstrated the same attributes as the faster players at Oxford University Chess Club: imagining from another perspective, and trying to rewrite the rules.

57 years on, these same ideas are enjoying a renaissance. On cinema screens, Scarlett Johansson’s cybernetically-enhanced Mira has drawn $160 million in box-office receipts. In the Italian Parliament, Guiseppe Vatinno sits as the first politician elected with a Transhumanist manifesto. This time, however, imagination is being matched by innovation. At the time of writing, billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk is assembling a team of elite scientists in San Francisco for his newest company, Neuralink, with a pledge to ‘develop ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect brains and computers’. Nicknamed the ‘Neural Lace’, this is the Metabolist’s vision is on the cusp of reality. For all its imagination, however, Musk’s vision is rather one-dimensional. Of Neuralink’s founding board, only one member has come from outside the highest echelons of neuroscience and engineering: Musk himself. The company is advertising to recruit scientists who specialize in microfabrication, brain-machine interfacing and immunohistochemistry, but not a single role asking for experience in man over machine. Musk has repeatedly assumed that cybernetic enhancements, properly constructed, can only be beneficial, and that artificial intelligence holds the capacity to outstrip the human brain in all meaningful regards. In his most recent interview in Dubai, he described the only reason for balance between human and machine intelligence as a trade-off between ‘control’ and ‘usefulness’. He has made no mention of the creative or empathetic abilities of the human brain, instead judging it by the same criteria as one might a processor. This perspective is a recent development – note how the Metabolists hoped to pool all mankind’s intelligence, while Musk would prefer to pair each brain with a machine – but has widespread currency in popular culture. Down the Californian coast at the Burbank studios, Marvel’s superhero Vision serves as a symbol of the unilateral superiority of artificial intelligence; on the day Neuralink launched, meanwhile, shares in Tesla soared. Are the days of the human brain numbered, then? To find someone looking to argue the opposite, asking whether human intelligence has unique abilities computers could never surpass, we must return to Oxford. While Musk draws the brightest young talent from across America, 85 year-old Professor of Mathematics Sir Roger Penrose has begun investigating whether there are some things the human brain can do that no machine ever could. His theory is that quantum effects in the brain allow humans to perform calculations far beyond any machine’s capability – we understand this as ‘creative’ intelligence. He still accepts Musk’s premise that all useful brain functions are calculations, but argues our brain has unique capabilities in that regard. Currently, the Penrose Institute is trying to prove this hypothesis by constructing puzzles which humans alone can solve, or at least solve much faster than computers. By analysing participants’ neural patterns as they tackle the puzzles, Penrose hopes to explain the source of human creativity or intuition. Earlier this year, Penrose publicly released his first puzzle, the chess problem pictured below. The subject matter was pointedly chosen, as supercomputers now easily beat the world’s

that intellectual capability (or as Musk put it, ‘usefulness’) is measurable as the speed and accuracy with which one can calculate a solution to a given problem. The most efficient solution appears to be based on finding a new problem with the same solution, but from a different perspective: something that, for those who were willing to abandon conventional chess practice, was not just easy, but instinctive.

strongest chess players, and computer-assisted play is growing in popularity. Penrose claimed that while many computers, trying to solve the problem move-by-move, would assume that Black was winning because he had far better pieces, a moderately skilled human would quickly see it was a draw through principle, because Black cannot make progress. Penrose also hoped that many more powerful computers would struggle to solve the puzzle because they would take a very long time to find such an odd position in their databases, while the human is unfazed by originality. The results of Penrose’s problem are not yet known, but it seems likely it has broadly worked as intended. When I put the problem to the best chess computer in the world, Komodo 10 (64 bit), and a range of members of Oxford University Chess Club (all strong amateurs), Komodo assumed that Black was easily winning, while all of the humans reached the correct solution relatively swiftly. In the course of my survey, however, there were a couple of unexpected twists. First, Penrose’s position is unique. Though there are a handful of other known positions where humans have found solutions computers cannot, only the very strongest players in the world have even a chance of solving them, and typically do so with computer assistance. Considering that the number of legal chess positions is 10121, the human achievement looks very small indeed. On this basis, if we were designing a cybernetically-engineered human for the sole purpose of playing chess, we might as well make the entire brain artificial: even if there are odd cases where humans outperform the machine, the probability of them showing up is so low that anything else would be inefficient. One conclusion we could draw is that human intelligence is, practically-speaking, doomed to inferiority, and Penrose’s exception is small comfort. Most of the chess-players I surveyed held this view, and argued that Komodo could easily be given the extra information to solve

the position if that were important. Musk also seems to be an adherent of this view, focusing on the need to retain control and accept human inabilities. The other possibility, however, is that Penrose’s position is an anomaly because it draws on parts of the brain chess rarely uses, and what he has really shown is not that human intelligence has useful superiorities, but that chess is limited as a context for that test. This idea finds support in a second unexpected finding. The puzzle is perhaps not as uniformly easy for humans as Penrose thinks: while his grandmaster brother might have had no problem with it, it took some of the surveyed chess-players a few minutes thought, while others managed it in seconds. There was no correlation between chess-playing standard and the speed of solution; when the participants were asked about how they approached the puzzle, however, an interesting pattern emerged. The faster players did not, as he expected, solve it through abstraction – working out that it was a draw through the principle neither side could make progress – but by instinctively asking why Penrose had set it up like he had (specifically, why most of the Black pieces were bunched on that side and there were three dark-squared bishops). The slower ones were those who came to this method late, or used move-by-move reasoning (like a computer) to reach a principle.

Although it might not work in the manner he intended, Penrose’s position shows that there is plenty of the human brain it would be useful to retain, even if usefulness were the only reason to do so. It suggests that Musk and his team have mistaken man for an outmoded machine, and forgotten how they communicate their visions, design software that sells and raise public awareness: by imagining the result from someone else’s perspective. Whether artificial intelligence could ever match this ability is currently unclear. Earlier this year, computer Libratus, defeated a range of world-leading poker players, demonstrating the ability to anticipate a human bluff. But it did so through a blend of calculation and machine learning, and with imperfect results. At the beginning of May, the first ‘emotional chat-bot’ was launched in China. Learning emotion by studying thousands of Weibo posts, it can adjust its tone according to human responses, but still fails to pass the Turing Test or detect skilful lies. Artificial intelligence still has a significant leap to make before it can match even the effects of human empathy and imagination. The Metabolists, just like many of their contemporaries, displayed a brash optimism: they assumed that science and society would evolve hand in hand, and that their duty was to shape that growth as best they could. Fastforward to today, and it is fear that underpins cybernetic visions. As Elon Musk most memorably put it, a neural lace is necessary to prevent us becoming a machine’s ‘house cats’. Musk may be right about the powerful potential of artificial intelligence, and his crack team of neuroscientists and engineers may well revolutionise that field. But on the other side of the Atlantic, Penrose’s chess puzzle seems to show that the human mind has plenty more to offer before it becomes a pet, with empathetic ability at its heart. Indeed, it shows that humans still have the capacity to both devise and solve problems which outsmart a world-leading machine. As ever in Oxford, tradition is not ready to move on yet. 

Arguably, the quicker players had not played by the spirit of the test, because the computer never had access to the information about the position’s context, and in a proper match such a tactic would never work. It does suggest, however, that the advantage the human had in Penrose’s puzzle was not calculating ability, as Penrose expected, but empathetic ability (understanding someone else’s perspective from experience). The faster the humans imagined the position from Penrose’s perspective, the quicker they saw what he was trying to prove. Having the most powerful computer in the world linked to their brain would not have helped them at all. On a very basic level, this conclusion challenges an assumption held by both Penrose and Musk:

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smail Khoi, the celebrated Iranian poet, lives in an apartment in an old Tudor house near London, the kind that creaks its history as you step onto the floorboards of a high-ceilinged hallway. I remember him sitting in a chair opposite a television, in a room with a reddish glow, that homely decadence that you only find when there’s a ‘Persian’ carpet covering every surface (we Iranians, of course, just call them carpets). The room was populated with mementos of people past – photographs and gifts; a portrait of him alongside his friend and mentor, fellow Iranian poet Mehdi Akhavan Sāless, painted by Amir Mohamad Ghasemizade. He spoke with the wisdom and compassion of those seasoned in loss. He had that listening presence which reassures wordlessly. My father and I were brought there and introduced to him by our friend, Vahid Davar, who knows Khoi well. Davar grew up reading Khoi’s poetry in Shiraz, and was just a child when Khoi was forced to flee Iran nearly thirty years ago. The two are generations apart: Davar is a rising diaspora poet who left Iran just a few years ago, while Khoi has a well-documented, illustrious career with more than 70 published collections. Yet, their lives belong to the same story: they are both poets joined by the same string of events that developed today’s Iran, and have both been uprooted and planted in the same foreign land.

And is it because we are not supposed to speak English, Let alone write it? Shit! I mean, Sorry. (‘Trespassing’, Voice of Exile) Khoi’s life has been shaped by his refusal to be silenced. He was an active part of a community of poets and artists who organised the famous Dah Shab-e Shehr, (Ten Days of Poetry) a festival in 1977 of poetry readings and speeches in protest against the despotic rule of the Shah. This is now seen as a key moment of a movement that culminated in the overthrowing of the Shah, and his exile from Iran. But the resistance movement itself was fraught with conflict – the Marxists, the liberals, and the Shi’ite Islamic clerics, such as Ayatollah Khomeini, had a common cause before the Shah was deposed. It was the latter group which succeeded in galvanising a large portion of the rural, devout population, and subsequently took control of the movement after the Shah was gone, eclipsing the complexities of a diverse revolution to project an international mirage of a unified Iran under the Islamic Republic. Khoi opposed the abuse of power that came with the marriage of religion and state with his characteristic vigour, and suffered censorship for it. For his safety, he was forced into hiding for three years before fleeing the country in 1983. He’s never been back home again.

Escaping the Revolution Niloo Sharifi For the last thirty years, the Iranian poet Esmail Khoi has turned his memories of revolution into poems that mourn the loss of his motherland. He speaks to the ORB about the anxieties of being a poet in exile. I ask him first for his opinions on the political turmoil of 2016. He begins to speak about Iran’s internal affairs. I clarify, telling him I was referring to more recent political developments, for example the victory of Trump in America and Brexit in the UK. Nevertheless, the focal point of his assessment is always Iran: ‘Well, in Iran, we are still in the trap of the Islamic Republic, and it gets worse by the day. Our country is in the hands of murderers and thieves, who are ruining our country.’ He is no less forgiving on Western politics. ‘As to worldwide events – with Theresa May and Donald Trump in charge, everything is deteriorating further. With Brexit, and the victory of Trump, and his so-called government – they are building a dark future for us all.’ As someone whose life has moved between homes and cultures, he speaks with the knowledge of one who sees all sides: ‘Iran is tickling the US, like a mouse playing with the tail of a lion, and on the other hand Trump is planning a massive growth of the defence budget, and developing the country’s military capacities.’ His words contain despair. ‘I fear the lives of many of our youths will be lost over emptiness and nothingness.’ Khoi speaks as though he still lives in Iran, as though his years in London are akin to a short holiday rather than permanent transition. I point out that his work is far more politically engaged and Iran-centred than, say, Mimi Khalvati’s, another Iranian poet living in London. ‘I really like her work, actually, but we are totally different,’ he tells me. He explains that she grew up in Switzerland and London, and left Iran as a child. ‘Niloofar-jan, you must understand something – a poet cannot write without first living. Seeing is everything.’ I suggest that Khalvati’s work is far more preoccupied with the abstract ideas that the Romantic poets were caught up in, while Khoi is more concerned with reality. His answer was revealing: ‘You’re right… and its the same way I differ from all English poets. Her experiences have been of English poetry; most of the poetry in my memory is Iranian. As for the realism of my work – how can I, for example, write about Khomeini and converse with Shakespeare? I can’t write pure poetry. I write political poetry.’

Khoi’s poetics are stepping with political imagery by necessity. His poems worry about their own longevity, and the self-effacing paradox of political poetry – total victory in any cause deadens political text, consigning it to a closed corner of time. The first poem in Voice of Exile is titled ‘Politico-poetics’, and is a kind of statement of intent for his whole text, an ars poetica. In it, he compares political poetry to that which is, or should be, obsolete, carrying out its function in the wrong time: a ‘“Modern Dinosaur”, / Or a “Holy War”, / Or a “Childless Mother”’. ‘Look,’ he goes on, ‘there’s a connection between freedom and the purity of poetry. The less free a society is, the more political their poetry will be. And the opposite is true. In an ideal society, political poetry would mean nothing, because we’d only know love and beauty. Take this example – If you, an Iranian girl, walk around bare-headed here, that’s not a political act. But in Iran, they’ll jail you for an undone button or a short skirt, or for baring your head.’ Catching his gist, I say in English ‘oppression radicalises expression’. ‘Exactly!’ he replies, ‘doroste (that’s right). Yep, yep, yep.’ Khoi formulates a poetics and a terminology for describing the complex relations that immigrants have with their homelands. For instance, my experience of being Iranian is comprised of being foreign in England, but also foreign in Iran. I was born in Liverpool, and aside from a year in infancy, grew up there until I was six. We moved to Shiraz for a year, then Tehran for another, then back to England at eight. My dominant notion of cultural identity revolved around a series of painful adjustments and careful negotiations of social identity in playgrounds. These negotiations were inherently political, but at that age, unlike Khoi, I lacked awareness of the politics that encircle me. Thinking about the differences between our relationship with Iran, it struck me how the word ‘immigrant’ projects the illusion of a monolithic group. We’re often thought of in terms of the effect we have on our country of arrival, making it easier to conceive of an ‘immigrant identity’. But the

Months after first meeting him, I now sit nervously in my room, listening to the dial tone blare out on speakerphone as I wait for him to answer. I’m calling to interview him about Voice of Exile. It is one of the few of Khoi’s volumes originally written in English, and although published in 2002, it retains its sharp relevance in our post-9/11 world. He lent me his own copy of the book when I met him, and it inspired me to write my undergraduate dissertation on it. I’ve been rereading his poems for weeks now, preparing myself for this moment, but when he picks up the phone, I’m all apologies – I hope he will forgive me for bothering him, and for my incomplete Farsi. I resist his reassurances, warning him that I’m liable to slip into English if the discussion gets too specific. For an Iranian like me, whose Farsi-speaking is largely confined between the walls of a Liverpool semi-detached, theoretical terms aren’t in day-to-day use. ‘No problem, we’ll shift gears into English if we need to’, he tells me, and so we begin.

complexities and concerns carried forward from home make comparisons between individuals at best analogous. Some arrive as adults, filled up with old truths and habits that will only ever be shorn away by degrees, slowly. Many leave unwillingly. Younger immigrants like myself are of softer matter to start with, and we try to mould ourselves around the hard-set totems of habit and ideology that confront us all at once as the New Truth. Khoi’s essay at the end of Voice of Exile develops a vocabulary to describe this difference: ‘In relation to the original homeland the immigrant mentality is one of despair, whereas the refugee mentality is one of hope… In relation to the host society, the immigrant mentality is one of engagement, whereas the refugee mentality is one of detachment.’ I fall under the category of ‘immigrant’ – I spend more time taken up with the problems of assimilating to an alien culture, and the social exclusion, micro-aggressions and institutional barriers we face. These issues often pale in comparison to concerns about the homeland for refugees like Khoi. In his poems, existence in exile is not life itself but a time for reflection upon it.

Now I start living at the sunny horizon of the life of the early-risers among a people whose dream-eyes are windows, opening every morning at the sight, and the height, and the might, of the sleeping volcano of Damavand (‘Afterlife’, Voice of Exile) In the poem ‘Home’, he describes feeling like ‘a goldfish / in a crystal jar / of hygiened water’. Iran in turn transfigures into a ‘swamp’, full of ‘snakes / and alligators / and filth’. The Farsi words for ‘snake’ and alligator’ are ‘maar’ and ‘soosmaar’, and the words lose their rhyme in English; despite being safer, his dream-eyes gaze on through to a home where at least he can find cohesion in his own country’s monsters. Khoi’s isolation, his feeling of floating in a crystal jar, is perhaps compounded by the fractured nature of the Iranian diaspora. He tells me a story that illuminates the huge variety in faith, ideology and lifestyle found even within immigrants from the same nation. He recounts how his and Manouchehr Mahjoubi’s concerted efforts to establish an Iranian community centre in London were hijacked by a war for control between competing ideological factions. The scattered Iranian diaspora community microcosmically reproduces the fractures and splits in Iran itself. Orthodox Muslims, liberal Muslims, pro-monarchists, secularists, communists, and more fought for dominance. Peace came only after full authority was given over to the London City Council, and it effectively became an extension of the Iranian embassy, solely for bureaucracy. Khoi goes on: ‘Any other nationality you can think of has a community centre in London, but we don’t… It is as if, we are more predisposed to assimilation [...] and at the same time are a state of disintegration.’ He switches to English for the words ‘assimilation’ and ‘disintegration’, a casual bit of poetry enabled by uniquely European linguistic patterns; there’s no equivalent quite as neat in Iranian. You might see our flitting between languages, what we call ‘Fenglish’ or ‘Fargilisi’ in the diaspora, as a pinup for literary opportunism, the rewards of cultural exchange. You could also see it as a bastardisation of both languages – I’ve met British Iranians who can speak neither language fluently. This is testament to the shattering impact of immigration. Living in a new country is like taking your world and shoving a whole other world into it. Suddenly, its so much bigger and full of things; sometimes it splinters beneath the weight.

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Khoi is undecided on whether this widening, or rather cluttering of perception is a positive thing. ‘I spent the first half of my life in Iran. I wrote 8 books of poetry in that time. But in exile, I’ve released more than 50 books. So I suppose I’ve had more to say, but my heart has been split in two, my life has been lived in two places.’ Writing from a double life to a double market of Iranians and unaffiliated outsiders, any time Khoi raises his voice he faces double consequences. Khoi recounts to me the part he played in the international movement of solidarity in response to the Iranian Supreme Leader’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and his novel The Satanic Verses. Khoi was an active organiser, working to gather signatures from esteemed literary figures across the globe, a largely symbolic gesture on the part of the majority of participants. But for Khoi, the punishment was real – the Islamic Republic issued a total ban on his poetry, and ordered every copy held by school or library destroyed, consigning his readership to furtive purchases from unlicensed street-sellers bold enough to stock his work. His poem ‘Criterion’ evokes in its title T.S. Eliot’s literary journal and his ebullient flaunting of a self-imposed ‘exile’ as a literary trope:

O, yes, now I know, that this is a circus in which, the stranger you look, the more foreign you sound, you are bound more to rise and more to shine on the pedestals of the International Show. (‘Criterion’, Voice of Exile)

an McEwan, both as a novelist and an essayist, has long involved himself in debates concerning human genetics. In his latest novel, Nutshell (2016), a retelling of Hamlet from the protagonist’s unique perspective as a foetus, he addresses the issue at its source – that is, its biological source, the womb. Brooding in a uterine ‘bubble of thoughts’ with the muffled sound of ‘scientists debating’ on the BBC World Service for entertainment (heard through the wall of his mother’s stomach, of course), the unborn speaker of Nutshell soon turns to questions of his own genetic circumstance. Will his DNA – his ‘helical twists of fate’ – provide a deterministic ‘recipe for [his] essential self ’, or will his ‘selfhood… be sculpted by pleasure, conflict, experience, ideas and [his] own judgement’? Evolutionary theory thus unsettles Shakespearean musings on identity in wickedly complex ways, and the existential hero of McEwan’s novel, plagued by these troubling meditations, fails to offer a conclusive view as to whether or not ‘biology is destiny’. Through the particular ways in which he crafts the speaker’s monologue, however, McEwan certainly seems to offer his own. Situating the protagonist in utero may be an unusual stylistic device to say the least, but it is not one without justification: over the past two decades, McEwan has taken a growing interest in the biological origins of the human animal, as have many of his academic peers. Take Steven Pinker, for example. Titan of evolutionary psychology and personal friend of McEwan, Pinker is part of an expanding cohort of scientific thinkers who are keen to stress the importance of biological nature, over circumstantial nurture, when it comes to determining our cognitive faculties. Taking issue with ‘the modern denial of human nature’, in 2002 Pinker wrote his best-selling book The Blank Slate, in response to a tide of post-Holocaust intellectuals who, mindful of the socially dangerous possibilities of overemphasising the significance of our genes, preferred instead to consider the role nurture plays in the shaping of lives. Although Pinker’s own work remains scientifically minded, he is curiously aware of how the understanding of the human brain propagated by his psychological literature

Thousands of Americans wore ‘I am Salman Rushdie’ badges, a scramble to flatly point out evidence of Iran’s primitive extremism. Nestling up to the hearth of the exotic, the rest of us were able to warm ourselves by a fire Khoi burned in. The ‘International Show’s’ rules state that the shining radiance Khoi emits from poetic pedestals is forbidden from entering his own home of Iran. Since leaving Iran for Britain, Khoi has experienced more and yet lived less; exile is life forever refracted through a single moment of loss, and so life is situated in the past. This is the reality of millions of refugees, increasing in number, who are been forced to survive by leaving life behind. Unsurprisingly, then, Khoi’s worldview rests somewhere between hope and despair. There is something optimistic in the figuring of political poetry as a ‘Modern Dinosaur’. Within this is contained a projection of a future where his work becomes defunct, a relic of the Jurassic past. As our phone conversation winds to an end, I tell him that the writing of political poetry is itself an act of optimism. His voice gives me a sense that I’ve missed the mark, but he simply notes, ‘Well, with that – that’s for you to know; that’s part of your own interpretation.’ Amongst many things, Khoi has been a teacher in his lifetime, and he must have been a good one. Unlike some poets and artists, he rarely wields his intelligence like a crowbar. When I visited him all those months ago, Khoi asked me to read him one of my original short stories. He listened patiently, nodding and chuckling in the right parts, and when it was over, he said

in English, ‘My dear, whether you like it or not, you are a writer’. This made me beam at the time, but it later it occurred to me that I couldn’t actually imagine him discouraging me. I’m sure he meant it, though – I believe he has a natural instinct for nurturing passion. It shows in the reverence and affection in Vahid Davar’s voice when he speaks of his friend and mentor, who he now looks to as Khoi looked to Sāless. Khoi avidly reads and responds to his poetry, and he treated my dissertation on his work with the same dignifying attention, reading the entire 8,000 words and giving me feedback. All day, his telephone rings as friends call him, no doubt seeking the same warmth he extended to a teenager he just met. To me, this generosity and investment in others, especially the young, is proof of Khoi’s quiet optimism. Although we British-Iranians are too often bereft of community centres and the attached familial sense of security that can be a surrogate for home, we may find ourselves momentary, minuscule communities – communities of 2, 3 and 4.

Ian McEwan's Brave New World Hugo Murphy In defiance of the the division of the two cultures, Ian McEwan promises to unify science and literature with human morality in his fictional worlds ‒ but does his vision fail to live up to its progressive aims? has begun to permeate more artistic spheres. Indeed, in a recent interview with McEwan, he was quick to point out how frequently the author goes out of his way to demonstrate findings of modern neuroscience in the thoughts of his foetal protagonist. When the speaker wonders, for example, ‘what disorder tells suspicious eyes’, concluding that ‘it can’t be morally neutral’, he shows influence of the experimental findings of Simone Schnall, which indicate that disgust, prompted by dirty domestic clutter, can increase the severity of moral judgments. And when he later complains, ‘Who knows what’s true. I can hardly collect the evidence for myself. Every proposition is matched or cancelled by another. Like everyone else, I’ll take what I want, whatever suits me’, he exhibits the typical process of confirmation bias, something to which we all unconsciously fall prey. And so there is a sense, in this way, as the speaker’s swirling thoughts fix themselves into expected patterns of neurological behaviour, that his mind is shaped by predetermining genetic forces out of his control, that biology is destiny. This appreciation for the instinctive operations of the human mind, this view of the brain underpinned by evolutionary biology, is not a recent fascination of McEwan’s; its moral implications bleed deep into the core of his body of writing, suffusing his work at both thematic and stylistic levels, and providing the very basis for why he writes. His is a fiction that has established itself on an understanding of a certain shared humanity, which depends on a common cognitive makeup. This engagement with science has afforded McEwan a unique creative platform that is no doubt responsible in part for his considerable commercial and academic success. But it is an interest that we must treat with an especially critical eye.

For placing a considerable emphasis on our biological nature, whilst perhaps scientifically accurate, if left unchecked, is liable to yield particularly regressive social views. Indeed, in light of recent advances in genetic engineering technologies, the future world convinced of McEwan’s outlook might see more frequent returns to the womb, tending to treat social issues via artificial syringe, rather than with conscientious government. In McEwan’s eyes, the most significant implications of evolutionary biology concern the ways in which humans can share perspectives and experiences with one another. Literature, he points out in his essay on ‘Literature, Science, and Human Nature’, as a vehicle of empathy, is only made possible because human minds function according to the same set of wired-in principles; we can imagine what it is like to inhabit another person’s head only because we share a common genetic inheritance. This, in McEwan’s words, is what provides the foundation for ‘literature’s ability to produce common values and shared experiences between people’. ‘Fiction,’ he explains, ‘is a deeply moral form in that it is the perfect medium for entering the mind of another’. There is a poignant, if somewhat jarring, moment in one of McEwan’s earlier, and arguably most accomplished, novels, Atonement (2001), which centres on our inability to see the world from somebody else’s perspective and sets this scientifically-minded worldview in a distinctly symbolic medical context. When Briony Tallis attends to a severely wounded soldier towards the end of the story, and stares into his open skull to see ‘a spongy crimson mess of brain’, we may well think to pause, recognising that this isn’t the first time in the

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I tell him that despite the vast gulf between our lived experiences, many of his lines rang within me like familiar chords. He replies, ‘Poetry is experienced alone, but is not lonely’ switching to English in order to convey the subtle valences of ‘alone’ and ‘loneliness’. He believes poetry has the potential to traverse the loneliness that separates us, and that there is an ultimate goal in doing so. Though Khoi, at times, seems to number himself amongst the dead of our country, his living words embody that living, vital spirit of inquiry and bravery that offers us hope for freedom.

Hey! Come! Let’s bury our dead and do what we may. (‘All Right!’, Voices of Exile) 

novel that Briony has peered into the mind of another human being. We might be prompted to recognise an abstract connection between the physical unveiling of a man’s mind, and his literarily-inclined nurse’s habit of imaginatively immersing herself into the thoughts of others. As she continues to survey the ward, confronted by more gaping wounds, observing that ‘every secret of the body was rendered up’, providing ‘new and intimate perspectives’, our suspicions deepen. Indeed, we might wonder whether McEwan is simply presenting us with gory reconfigurations of what his fiction – notable for its use of free indirect style – aims to do: penetrate the consciousness of others. So pervasive is this theme in McEwan’s work that critics have found it hard to avoid commenting on his writing without the use of a distinctly surgical lexicon: he ‘operates’ with ‘technical assurance’ (Henry Hitchings, Financial Times); ‘His precise, taut prose cuts clean as a scalpel’ (Ruth Scurr, The Times). And in fact, earlier in the same novel, Robbie, a young and ambitious man, speculates as to whether ‘he would be a better doctor for having read literature’. McEwan certainly thinks so, asserting later in the passage, ‘Birth, death, and frailty in between. Rise and fall – this was the doctor’s business, and it was literature’s too.’ For McEwan, then, science and literature provide equally valid means for probing the human mind, and so the two are inextricably linked. The sorts of references to modern psychology we find in his latest novel do not merely feature as tropes; they provide the very basis of his writing method and purpose. This is McEwan’s stake in the ‘Third Culture’ debate, the ideology upon which his fiction hinges, and it has caught the attention of several of his critics, most notably Dominic Head and Laura Salisbury. Borrowed from C P Snow’s famous 1961 return to the two cultures debate, ‘The Two Cultures: A Second Look’, the Third Culture philosophy is one that refuses to pit the arts and the sciences against one another, preferring instead to recognise that, in Salisbury’s words, ‘the relationship between literature, critical thought, and morality, is explicitly underpinned by various engagements with a public scientific culture dominated by an interest in evolution and genetics’. This

it as a cornerstone of Western, secularized society, the text simultaneously reveals how its application is constructed and so easily perverted’. Through his privileged hero, McEwan inadvertently reminds us that an ostensibly empathetic gesture can be just as much a reassertion of social inequality as a bridging of that gap, pointing ultimately to an impulse to master the Other. And this is a power dynamic which seems largely to be defended by difference dictated by biological nature. In this way, McEwan, though a vocal supporter of a political liberalism, falls foul of the socially regressive and morally lazy view that our genetic makeup determines our social lives, at both an intimate and societal level.

philosophy, touted with increased vehemence in the intellectual circuit by the likes of Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, John Brockman, and E O Wilson (all academic comrades of McEwan) has significant implications, not just for the ways in which we understand human empathy, but also for the structuring of our national education systems, which, at the present moment, tend to steer the arts and sciences away from each other. Sensitive to this, some writers have planted their flag even deeper than McEwan in the Third Culture debate, and broached both of these topics in their work. David Lodge, for example, has sided with McEwan in his discussions in Consciousness and the Novel (2002), stressing that novels can ‘give us a convincing sense of what the consciousness of people other than ourselves is like’. But in his own fiction, Lodge has usually chosen instead to emphasise the important bearings the Third Culture worldview has on educational institutions, casting many of his novel’s characters as university professors. The most important ramifications of the Third Culture movement, however, concern its view of the human mind, and they have continuously posed ideological problems for McEwan in his work. If, as McEwan and his intellectual allies suggest, our genetically inherited nature plays such a central role in shaping the way we think, dictating that all humans share a fundamental genetic basis for sympathy, then it becomes difficult to explain disagreements as anything other than a matter of miscommunication, or limited perspective. As a result, the tragic dilemmas upon which most stories pivot can no longer be upheld. Indeed, the central moral paradox of Hamlet – the competing ethical impulses to avenge the murder of a father and not to kill – is not something McEwan has preserved in Nutshell: as British novelist and literary critic Adam Mars-Jones pointed out in an article in the London Review of Books, ‘revenge isn’t a duty that can realistically be laid on Nutshell-Hamlet’, given his imprisonment in the womb. McEwan manages to sidestep this issue in the novel because Nutshell isn’t much of a novel at all: plot takes a back-seat role throughout, and what we’re ultimately left with is a series of philosophical meditations dressed up as fictional monologue. And he has succeeded in overcoming the same problem in the past by spinning other clever tricks of plot – as in Atonement, for example, which draws on a unique storyline that turned this weakness into a strength, making a thematic focus out of human misunderstandings. For McEwan as a novelist elsewhere, however, this has been a more awkward problem, demonstrated most glaringly in his 2005 novel, Saturday, which follows an unusually eventful day in the life of London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. Here, McEwan faces a challenge common to all storytellers: devise an ideological clash between protagonist and

antagonist – a legitimate disagreement that drives a rift between the two. Without this, a novel lacks the imaginative energy necessary to drive the forward momentum of plot, and fails to seduce its readers into turning pages. But with an idealised view of human empathy, it is difficult for McEwan to pit his characters against one another so convincingly; and so, in Saturday, he resorts to caricaturing the novel’s antagonist, Baxter, making him out as a flat and therefore not within his model of shared sympathies underpinned by common cognitive abilities. At various points in the narrative, we are reminded of Baxter’s ‘simian’ semblance, his ‘vaguely ape-like features’. Coupled with this allusion to a primitive state of being is his unique health condition: suffering from Huntington’s disease, which upsets the brain’s capacity to regulate mood and perform certain basic mental processes, Baxter is described in the novel as, neurologically speaking, a ‘special case’. This distasteful association of a legitimate genetic disorder with a state of evolutionary primitivism becomes further tangled in uncomfortable ways when it comes to questions of social status. For Baxter’s hereditary disorder seems to exist hand in hand with the fact that he is a man of the working class – a rarity in McEwan’s bank of fiction. Uncultured and scientifically illiterate, Baxter sidles up to Perowne in their first confrontation accompanied by his two thuggish mates; as a foil to the protagonist, who is defined by his piercing intelligence, Baxter, a criminal, is characterised largely by mindless aggression. In this way, McEwan, unable to account for legitimate conflict whilst maintaining that humans are neurologically compatible, forces one of his characters into the category of the subhuman. He chooses the socially inferior of the two, who also suffers from a rare genetic disorder. And so, although McEwan never confirms a direct link between Baxter’s subhuman state, inherited condition, and low social status, he certainly implies one.

It comes as something of a surprise, then, to discover that McEwan has also recognised at several points in his novels just how important a role circumstantial chance plays in deciding personal prosperity. As he writes in The Children Act (2014), ‘It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and finetuning that alter fates, the close and distant in influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.’ Clearly McEwan recognises that our experiences in the world, with its ‘tangle of hideous contingencies’ (Nutshell), are crucial in determining each of our fates. But he fails to grapple with this reality meaningfully enough for it to seep into the thematic bedrock of his stories. Ultimately, in all of his novels, the importance of genetic determinism wins out. In Saturday, accidents of character trump those of circumstance: McEwan chooses to focus not on key social issues at play, but the ‘human essence’, the ‘essentials of character’, ‘how the [genetic] cards in two packs are chosen’, invoking the metaphor his friend Richard Dawkins uses in The Selfish Gene. For Baxter, the ‘misfortune lies within a single gene’, just as for another unfortunately diseased person in The Children Act, a single ‘gene transcribed in error’ governs fate. As Perowne deduces from a cursory examination of his counterpart, so may we judge McEwan’s fiction: ‘Here’s biological determinism in its purest form’. But it is in Nutshell, McEwan’s latest novel, that his focus on genetics seems to have taken its most extreme form. Is his decision to locate his hero in the womb, I wonder, not only a stylistic device, but also intended to signal his standing in the nature-nurture debate? For here is a character with fully-fledged thoughts, emotions, and desires, and is yet to see the

McEwan’s writing may well find its ideological methodology in an appreciation for the capacities of human empathy, but in ways like this it succeeds better in highlighting its limits. If, as he argues, ‘When a novel shows us intimately, from the inside, other people, it then does extend our sympathies’, then why not grant the reader this intimacy with Baxter? We are not offered an insight into the antagonist’s mind through the use of free indirect style, and when his head is eventually cleaved open on Perowne’s operating table, it provides only an unpleasant inversion of empathy: the neurosurgeon’s purpose is not to understand Baxter, but to change (or ‘save’) him. As University of Nevada Professor Tim Gauthier, who has written widely on artistic reactions to social and personal traumatic experiences, wisely concludes, ‘while Saturday may declare the need for empathy and extol

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light of day. Perhaps, then, he also expects us to attach some kind of symbolic significance to the fact that the speaker’s murderous relatives meet their fate due to the forensic discovery of their DNA. It is likely that McEwan understands the dangerous possibilities of a worldview that places too extreme an emphasis on the role our genes play in shaping our lives, just as his Third Culture comrades have acknowledged. In the introduction to The Blank Slate, Pinker directly addresses how a belief in genetic determinism has historically underpinned many of the regressive arguments that have been used to defend authoritarian social mores, such as slavery and the divine right to rule, as well as detailing how the opposite view of the human animal (as a tabula rasa from birth) has typically been aligned with socially progressive movements. But the wide documentation of this trend hasn’t prevented McEwan from showing a certain social ignorance in the past, tending to diagnose personal problems as biologically programmed, rather than socially induced. In the world we live in today, the moral implications of this issue are more severe, and tangible, than ever. As Michael Sandel warned in his 2009 BBC Reith Lectures, ‘today’s debates about genetic engineering and enhancement are reminiscent of an older debate about eugenics – the misbegotten attempt to improve the so-called gene pool of humankind’. Each technological advance brings a Promethean responsibility closer to our doorstep, and efforts to safeguard against the ethical perils of this hubristic science are slowly eroding away. Before long, McEwan may not be alone in making efforts to probe the womb. Indeed, only three months ago, the Guardian reported that rapidly increasing numbers of US institutions are announcing their endorsement of the future use of human gene editing procedures. The new possibility of manipulating our own biological nature provides fertile ground for the McEwanPinker camp to spiral out of control. Now is the time for us to tackle the issue head-on. With a returned emphasis on our biological nature comes a renewed obligation to ward off an ignorant public conscience, in ensuring that a new wave of social myopia does not rear its head. 

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realise what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do.

s Oscar Wilde was led handcuffed between two policemen in front of the crowds filling the road between his prison and the Court of Bankruptcy, a friend, Robbie Ross, stepped out from their midsts and publically and gracefully tipped his hat to the writer. Wilde remembered this ‘little, lovely, silent act of love’ years later as he wrote De Profundis [‘from the depths’] in his prison cell. This sign of sympathy, a recognition from one man to another of commonality and respect in the context of shame and exclusion, ‘made the desert blossom like a rose, and brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the wounded, broken, and great heart of the world’. Wilde’s letter, later published for the public, is an act of connection itself, reaching out as a prisoner, an outcast man, to the world from whom his suffering is hidden. He speaks for his co-prisoners too, explaining ‘I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering’. In this notion of ‘symbolic relation’ we see Wilde investing within the experience of prison a certain terrible knowledge accessible only through this very specific perspective of the imprisoned, excluded individual. Wilde’s words are an act of conversation, bringing those placed outside society, and what they have learnt, into a shared cultural discourse. Prison occupies an unknowable space in society, containing the people deliberately hidden and segregated from the general public. Current debate has brought widespread attention to matters of controversy surrounding the American prison system. Ava DuVerney’s 2016 documentary investigating prison culture in the USA, 13th, was the first documentary ever to open the New York Film festival, highlighting the urgency of debates about injustice in the justice system in contemporary America. In 1970 the prison population of the United States stood at roughly 200,000 – today it is closer to 2,000,000. America, the land of the free, is one of the most imprisoned nations in the world – home to 25 per cent of the world’s prisoners. These statistics show something deeply disturbing about the way a nation thinks about its citizens, and the state’s responsibility and right to condemn and intervene with individual lives. DuVerney’s documentary is just one of a number of voices demanding a consideration of the social effect of the current policy. The exponential increase in imprisonments has had a disproportionate effect on African American communities: one in three black men in the United States can expect to go to prison in their lifetimes. Many social commentators have stressed that the consequences of the culture spurned by Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 declaration of a 'War on Crime' have served to initiate a new stage of racial and classist oppression, just as the greatest achievements of the Civil Rights movement were being made. Prisons, they argue, act as social cleansers, removing those that elite society deem unacceptable; works like DuVerney’s try to give this sector a voice with which to reiterate their right to a presence within mainstream discourse. Prison writing – about prisons, by prisoners, from prisons – traces a long heritage in western literature as a genre entrenched with questions piercing the core of human consciousness. Some quality of incarcerated experience, lying in the forced remission of those human rights that by their very name claim to define our concept of the human, offers the conditions of a literary space particularly amenable to these considerations of humanity. The 6th century writer Boethius composed the De Consolatione Philosophiae whilst imprisoned awaiting execution. Visited, in his story, by the

Locked Up Literature Clarissa Mayhew Imprisonment leaves the incarcerated with few liberties left. But often one of them is the freedom to compose their own histories, and in doing so both reflect the present and rewrite the future. Lady Philosophy, he comes to see that he is twice constrained: physically, in his body, and mentally, in his despondency. The consolation Philosophy offers is that mortal life, beholden to the arbitrariness of fortune and the whims of fate, is nothing compared to the life of the soul. Philosophy offers freedom from this imprisonment of the mind, after which no bodily affairs can matter to him. From the darkest hour of physical peril comes liberation of his soul. Boethius’ text opens a window into his soul. In his suffering he exposes the reader to a privileged vision of his mind, sorrow and then revelation. We watch as his consciousness is challenged, responds to its new conditions – what Wilde calls the 'knowledge of sorrow' – and learns to see anew. Exposure is central to the prison experience. Jeremy Bentham’s 1791 ‘Panopticon’ design models the ‘ideal’ prison building. Used as an inspiration for the real designs of Pentonville and Millbank, the intention of this prison is to create an illusion that one overseer might watch all inmates at same time without them knowing. As this is physically impossible, the system depends instead on the basis that the inmates do not know when they are being watched – they therefore must act as though they were always observed. The voyeurism inherent to this nature of imprisonment comes with a deliberately oppressive purpose, described by Bentham as 'a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.' From this attempt to invade and limit the mind, prison literature fights back: whilst prisons hold inmates in positions of forced publicity, prison writing exposes the prison and what is inside it – what the state, the system, tries to hide and to silence. Looking through the lists of writers associated with prisons, it is remarkable quite how many were imprisoned as a result of their literary activity. In these cases imprisonment is a silencing technique – publication can be seen as a refusal to submit and an act of resistance. The books If This Is A Man (Primo Levi, 1947) and The Gulag Archipelago (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1973) expose two of the most notoriously oppressive regimes of the 20th century. Solzhenitsyn revealed the brutal system of forced labour upon which the USSR depended, undermining forever its moral standing and undeceiving the communist sympathisers in the West who still based their ideology on the Soviet state of their naive delusions. His mammoth text parallels a history of the development of the gulag system with an account of the path a typical 'zek' (inmate) through the camps. The impact of the work was enormous – confronting the world with the brute truth hidden behind the carefully constructed propaganda front of the Soviet Union. A concern that dominates the text is the nature of evil. Solzhenitsyn does not represent ‘evil’ people and ‘good’ people but shows both within every man. He comments on the enviable ease that a belief in pure evil might bring: 'If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?' The world and man mix, and whatever the rhetoric of a prison system might claim, it is impossible to separate bad from good by relocation of persons. This realisation is reflected in Solzhenitsyn’s thinking on the question of response: 'confronted by the pit

into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't'. The drama is as much one of self-recognition, as political condemnation. It documents knowledge learnt whilst 'rotting on prison straw' of the fundamental capacity for evil and good in all, and that chance is all the difference between a perpetrator and a victim. Levi’s memoir revolves around the question it poses in its very title, a question it leaves open to the reader to determine: are there conditions in which having the body of a human is not enough to be a man? In the mud and the cold, scrabbling for morsels of food, utterly bereft of any semblance of ‘human dignity’, two moments stand out in answer to this question. In successive chapters he recalls being examined

for a post in the chemical lab by the aryan Doktor Pannwitz and trying to communicate Dante to Pikolo, the French man with whom he carries soup. When Pannwitz looks across his clean, ordered office at the dirt covered Jew, 'that look was not one between two men'. The absence of recognition of each other’s humanity makes this 'as though it came across the glass window of an aquarium'. This, Levi says, is the insanity of the Third Reich – that it made men not men. When walking with Pikolo, conversely, the lines

Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance Your mettle was not made; you were made men, To follow after knowledge and excellence poorly translated from Italian into broken French, are more important than soup for the starving Levi – for these words remind him that they are men. His desperate, inelegant conveyance is a bridge between him and his equally wretched companion – a link not just between themselves, but with Dante, with literature, with humanity. It is through literature later – this book – that Levi chooses to make his statement and records his witness of humanity amongst inhumanity. The responsibility of the witness is a theme both writers explicitly dwell upon. They speak of their writing almost as an obligation. Levi writes: 'We hoped not to live and tell our story, but to live to tell our story'. Solzhenitsyn’s work is dedicated, chillingly, to those that did not live to tell their own stories, from whom he asks forgiveness for everything he could not tell.

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Publication is their act of remembrance – not for themselves only but inviting all their readers to join them. Their books call us to remember too, and in remembering to be chastened. Prison literature need not only signify literature in the traditional sense: in the 21st century writing for other mediums is gaining serious recognition. In the realm of prison literature, Orange Is The New Black is the prime example. Episodic, with an interlacement of multiple plots and grand diversity of characters from across American society, the show bears interesting points of comparison to the condition-of-England novels of authors like Charles Dickens, whose Little Dorrit is a striking critique of the debtors prisons of his own day. The series creator, Jenji Kohan, spoke in an interview of using Piper, the show’s protagonist, as a ‘Trojan horse’: the story of a privileged white girl is used to publish the stories of underrepresented and marginal groups. This concurs with the history of prison fiction as a way to get in touch with the hidden side of society not visible in mainstream narratives. The show utilises the unnatural totally controlled environment within prison to bring into relation characters who in outside life would be unlikely ever to meet, experimenting with

what happens when different cultures, classes and backgrounds converge. The individuality of the characters underlines how, despite the efforts of the institution to homogenise, these differences do not fade away. The cliques and customisations all point to people determined to maintain their identity but also to form communities, albeit excluded from everyday society. The show has been lauded for raising incredibly important social questions, one being the attention paid to the eye-watering numbers imprisoned on account of drug-related crimes. A joke stands out:

Caputo: 'Immigration Violations: The Next Goldmine.' (He takes his glasses off and looks at Linda.) What was the last goldmine? Linda: The War on Drugs, I guess? (She smiles, shrugs and takes a sip of her chardonnay.) With the percentage of federal inmates incarcerated for narcotics offenses standing at a shocking 46.3%, these are ‘jokes’ that demand to be taken seriously. A word that appears again and again in discussions of the show is 'humanising': at its core, this is what prison literature seems to do – to remind us of the human agents behind the faceless institutions which linger at the back of every national consciousness. Prison literature brings us to that which we would rather ignore, those that society has rejected, and demands that we confront a difficult and uncomfortable human reality. 

If Paths Could Speak A Diary by Jem Bossata Tales from Lake Como

he neighbour Bruno and his old blind dog Rocky were the last of the old herders in the beautiful Alpine hamlet of Sant’Anna, Lake Como. Well into their old age they would lead their livestock up the mountain just before summer came. There, they’d see out the hottest months in cooler skies and return to the village in autumn. The clack-clack of cowbells rippled through these cobbled walkways twice a year, every year. And so for centuries, the generations have etched paths into the hillside like lines in the pages of history. These paths have been walked by Saint Don Guanello, who went on to build orphanages all around the world but began with the poorest children in these very villages. During the war, the ground thundered with the boots of German soldiers. The air rang with their gunshots, too, when the sons of the village smuggled tobacco and fine meats from over the hills. Benito Mussolini slunk through in the dead of night as he tried to escape to Switzerland. He was captured in the next village along and killed a little further down. But of everyone that has trodden these paths, it is the herders and farmers whose boots left the deepest impression. And when Rocky died last year, Bruno hung up his for the last time. My granddad was never a herder but he made paths of his own, up to the haphazard patches of land that belong to Bosatta family. On an October morning, he takes me to visit one of them, called the Fumia, a thirty-by-ten metre stretch of grass with a fig tree in the corner. The way is uneven and treacherously steep, but for all his health complaints he negotiates it steadily. His efforts are rewarded: though late in the season, the figs still hang heavy and sweet as if it were midsummer. Nature never lets you down, he says.

rowsing for facts on Peter Singer’s Wikipedia page the night before I’m to meet him, I discover that one of his grandparents was interned at Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, where several of my relatives were too. ‘Ice-breaker’, I think, confidently sliding the fact into my mental back-pocket. In the end, it doesn’t break as much ice as planned. The disclosure becomes another obstacle in the room as we enter – I fumble around for the lights, rearrange the chairs.

He’s in a rare good mood, and a nostalgic one. As we amble back down the hill the delicate aroma of late-blooming grass rises to greet us. He remembers the summer just past, my mother shimmying up those same fig branches with quite some agility: she's fifty-one! Six months ago, installing a makeshift gate in the Fumia, to protect his olive sapling from wild deer and boars. Wartime, the German soldiers are cruel rationers: his aunt lays snares to catch badgers. Tough, but good with polenta. Now the cows are down from the hilltop for the winter ahead. The boy Luigi sleeps on the summer's straw a few metres away from them; the smell of dampness and the animals' musty warmth mixes with the dry autumn air. In the middle of the night, a mother rustles and the bell around her neck wakes him up. Clack-clack. Indescribable. He tells me of the Muccecc', thieving marauders from the neighbouring valley; of an old pet dog that used to keep him company on his walks, twenty-five kilogrammes on his back, lakeside-to-hilltop before the sun came up; of great curved hunter's knives which the locals would use one-handed to cut their bread and cheese – in the pews at mass you could spot the red handles peeking out of the men’s pockets in their Sunday best. On the wall by the roadside lies a rusted hook, eight inches long and a centimetre thick, rubbed smooth on the inside of the bend. Nonno Luigi picks it up and reads it in a second. It's a relic from the old hay transport system, La Corda di Manda-Giù (the send-me-down rope). Once there was a series of such hooks that led from nearby Nebbia all the way up to the meadows of Giuan. The field workers would pass a long metal rope through the hooks, tauten it from both ends and rap twice on the line when they were ready to send down a load of hay. Then a large metal box, stuffed to the brim, would career down the zipwire at great speeds, eventually crashing into the road at the bottom. People died. A lizard scurries up the wall. Nonna Laura found a snake once, near the outhouse, quite small but quick and poisonous. Their

friend Mariangela stormed out of her door with pots and pans and killed it without a fuss. When its belly was split open, they found a litter of baby snakes inside. It was a mammal, says Nonno. These things do happen. So we lapse between history, legend, and comfortable silence. This ground is also rich soil for the imagination. Once, Luigi saw a wild boar in the tangled roots of a fallen tree: he glued in a red glass bead for the eye and hung it above the pantry door. My brother and I inherited his eyes for the forest. We would cut switches from a hazel tree and whittle a bow or a dagger. There were monsters in every tree stump, an enemy ambush in every copse, and we rushed around for hours doing battle with the beasts of the woods. But when it was the season for wild mushrooms and chestnuts, it was still the old man who always spotted the best ones. Six months after that day, I’m sitting at breakfast with Nonno once more. He tells me he can’t remember why the Fumia’s called the Fumia, it just is. Then he leaves us to our coffee and hobbles outside to run errands. We hear a crash, followed by silence. We guess he’s dropped something and stare into our cups until eventually Nonna peers out of the window and lets out a cry. Nonno’s lying on his back, stiff and stubborn and silent – too proud to call for help. He’s already moving his good leg up and down, as if to say he’s fine. He won’t look us in the eye as we heave him to his feet. An hour later he’s walking around again without complaints. But I can’t help the feeling that after all these years, the winding path to the Fumia has already felt his footsteps for the last time, like so many other paths on this mountain; like the rows of woodworking tools gathering dust; like the chipped and faded paint on the hunters’ knives; like the rusted hook lying on the wall; like the crumbling stone cattle-sheds in the village. And with that I know that neither I nor anyone will hear these stories again. So I bite back tears and write them down.

The Consequential Philosopher John Maier Peter Singer, the most prominent utilitarian philosopher of his age talks to ORB about the haughtiness of critics, alienation, suffering and the importance of academic freedom.

Mercifully, there’s not much one can say or do to ruffle Mr Singer. He brings to bear on every subject a breezy antipodean coolness. In fact, this probably goes some way to explain why many find him and his positions so disquieting. He’s spent his carrier pitching his tent on some of applied ethic’s most unstable territory – abortion, euthanasia, infanticide, animal rights – and all the while his characteristic, methodical detachment forbids the intrusion of unhelpful emotions and the clamorous hysteria of the outside world. Singer is the recpient of numerous philosophical superlatives, not all of them complimentary; he is the most famous living philosopher, the most influential, the most controversial, the most dangerous. In much of his work there’s a flavour of activism. Roger Scruton once complained that, for all their status as philosophic works, Singer’s books are vanishingly thin on philosophical argument. But one cannot help feel that criticisms like this misconceive Singer’s intentions somewhat. ‘I didn’t want to spend my life discussing problems that were only of interest to other philosophers’, he confesses. ‘“Do we know that we’re not dreaming now?” It’s an interesting philosophical question, but it’s not really something that is going to affect anyone’s life – it’s not a hypothesis that you can take very seriously in that sense.’

the broader world.’ It’s an aspiration redolent of a line of Daniel Dennett’s, that philosophers who concern themselves only with the subjectmatter of philosophy ‘consign themselves to a janitorial role’ in the whole enterprise.

When considering his career, and whether he wanted to pursue philosophy, ‘the answer was always a conditional “yes”’ – conditional on his being able to escape the ‘narrow confines of academia and actually have some impact in

It seems most of Singer’s career has been spent in refusing such janitorial work. Consequently, he seems to have evaded capture by the chief stereotype of contemporary analytic philosophy, which holds that it is overly fussy, pedantic and

inward-looking. I wonder if Singer has some sympathy with this common complaint against the tradition, whether he is even bored by some of the field’s more esoteric concerns. ‘I don’t think [they’re] boring. Some of these problems are intrinsically intellectually interesting.’ Part of the explanation for the present condition of practiced philosophy, no doubt, has something to do with its absorption into the academy, and the division of labour that results.

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 As Singer says, ‘you’ve got to publish papers in order to get a tenured position, and so on. And therefore you’ve got to say something new, and therefore people tend to take on small, very small things.’ There is, assuredly, a pragmatic streak, an urgency, in Singer – one that repels him from the metaphysical parlor games practiced by so many philosophers. ‘It’s not very likely that you’re going to make a great deal of progress on them when other great minds have been thinking about them for a long time.’ In applied ethics, however, there are certainly areas where one can ‘contribute more, whether or not you make huge philosophical breakthroughs. You may be able to contribute more in the sense of helping to make those issues comprehensible and salient to lots of people outside academic philosophy.’ As a utilitarian Singer holds that the morally right thing to do is act so that the consequences of one's action maximise the aggregate amount of pleasure or happiness in the world. One could looks at Singer’s career as a sustained project of applying the utilitarian principle to various thorny or under-examined issues. Out of his examination fall some striking results, some of which turn on what we take to count as a ‘person’. Some non-human animals may qualify as persons, a fact which should be reflected in our treatment of them; on the other hand, some severely disabled individuals may not, suggesting to Singer that in certain exceptional circumstances, infanticide or euthanasia may be a morally permissible, or even recommended. It is characteristic of Singer’s view that various, superficially antagonistic, courses of action are licensed. Always, ticking away beneath such seeming tension, is his unfaltering utilitarian logic. His first great success – the paper ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ – made the utilitarian case for a drastic increase in aid relief for starving Bangladeshi refugees, comparing, in a thoughtexperiment, the refusal to donate with the act of ignoring the death throes of a drowning child just meters away. Proximity shouldn’t matter. Distance is not morally relevant. There is, according to Singer, nothing rational about

being willing to help in former situation and not the latter, and only irrationality says otherwise. It is today somewhat odd to consider the novelty of this paper when it was first published – a reflection that is doubtless a testament to the unobtrusive influence Singer’s brand of utilitarianism has exerted on our collective moral consciousness. Similarly unignorable was Singer’s Animal Liberation, which, upon publication in 1975, became the founding treatise of the incipient animal rights movement. The book is an attack on the ‘speciesism’ involved in disregarding the interests and suffering of animals, particularly those farmed for their meat and produce. When we suffer, we suffer as equals, animals and humans alike; it is ‘speciesistic’ to hold otherwise. I ask him whether he regretted choosing this rather unchewable word for the prejudice he coined. He smiles. ‘A lot of people think that I should have chosen “specism” rather than “speciesism”. It’s a bit easier to say. Yeah, possibly, but it’s too late.’ He trails off, unexcited by the thought. Ever the utilitarian, regret seems an inefficient allocation of attention. What of the frustratingly piecemeal progress of the animal liberation movement? He starts, then stops. ‘I think I’m probably, yes, somewhat disappointed that the movement has not made faster progress …on the other hand, as I say, it could have just completely disappeared without a trace… You just have to look around at how many more vegans there are now than there were when the book appeared. Nobody would understand what the word “vegan” meant then. So I’m pleased that the movement is there… even if I wish it had made faster gains than it has.’ Singer’s clear style, his hygienic, tight prose, all bespeak a desire that his conclusions be broadly accessible. Doesn’t this involve a displeasing compromise in which theoretic subtlety is fileted out of his positions so that they might be fit for general consumption? To some, this gives his whole position the unpalatable flavour of the government-house, with ethical conclusions being prescribed, rather than built from the ground up. ‘I think there’s another alterative’, Singer counters, ‘and that is to show people that their own intuitive judgments are not really consistent with each other… and that therefore they have to re-think what they’re doing. So that doesn’t have to be from the ground up… Take what I argued in “Famine, Affluence and Morality”. You would save the child in the pond, you’re not saving the child in Bangladesh. Why is that? There’s no ground-up stuff there, there’s no foundations there...’ Yet, even today, and in the developed world, where effective altruism or vegetarianism are vociferously defended, and eminently possible practices, there are many content to live in a state of cognitive dissonance – mindful, for example, of the arguments against harvesting meat, but unwilling to alter their habits. ‘[It] does say something about [an individual’s] indifference to the world…and the amount of suffering they create, which is, when you stop and think about it…distressing.’ Does Singer resent friends or family who continue to eat meat? ‘I suppose as far as family are concerned, I’ve just come to accept the way they are. I mean my immediate family is all vegetarian at least, but if we spread out to others – the non-nuclear family – then certainly there’re lots of people who eat meat’. He fidgets. ‘To some extent I just accept the way they are’. He is more annoyed by those professed ‘animallovers’ who nonetheless eat meat. ‘People will pat their dog or cat and stick a fork into another animal’, he muses, grimly. ‘Do you like animals?’ I ask him, quickly. ‘I’m not an animal lover’, he replies, ‘I mean… I don’t feel I want to live with an animal particularly.’ Surely, it is to Singer’s credit that his deep concern for animals stems not from a personal disposition of fondness, but rather

is borne of pursuing his principles to their natural conclusions. Yet it is precisely this high-mindedness that, for some, represents utilitarianism’s greatest drawback. Bernard Williams notoriously attacked utilitarianism’s disregard for an individual’s basic integrity. The demandingness of utilitarianism, and its emphasis on the impartial ‘point of view of the universe’, render it inimical to the kind of human flourishing that is grounded in personal projects and deep commitments. To be a utilitarian, according to Williams, is profoundly alienating, if indeed it is even possible. He famously predicted that, come a day not too far off, no one would any longer discuss the doctrine seriously. Singer has certainly been the protagonist in the thwarting of Williams’s lofty prediction, and not by explicitly confronting his challenges, but by making utilitarianism relevant to questions of public concern. Does he perceive Williams’ as the strongest challenge he faces? ‘No’, Singer decides, ‘Some of the things Williams says do not seem to me very powerful… I think [utilitarianism], in fact, is closer to the views of a lot of people than someone like Williams seems to think.’ Williams was, I agree, prone to a kind of mystique, which prioritised stylistic elegance over directness. ‘And there’s a certain attitude that I feel coming through’, Singer agrees, ‘which is that “this sort of view, [utilitarianism]… it’s really rather crude, and we more erudite people, can see what’s wrong with that in some way”… It’s a bit of an attitude that Oxford can engender I think’, he smiles knowingly.

speak, attempted to drown him out with noise, and even rushed the stage in attack, smashing his glasses.

You don’t try to prevent them from getting their views either spoken on a platform, or… published in a journal.’

I ask him whether he is feels academic freedom is similarly threatened thirty years on. ‘[The threats have] come back, actually. And, surprisingly, it’s spread to English-speaking countries. Of course I got protests for my views in the United States, for example. But the protests came from conservative anti-abortion people, and they did not try to prevent me speaking, they stood outside with placards of dismembered fetuses or something, and handed out leaflets, and said people shouldn’t go and listen to me.’

Of course, the comical aspect of such cases of attempted censorship is the self-effacing nature of their effect. ‘The whole thing is really counterproductive in terms of the aims of what people are trying to achieve. I became vividly aware of that myself with the protests in Germany. You could really very closely track the sales of the German translation of Practical Ethics, which had been negligible until 1989… The sales line sort of goes like this…’ Singer traces a flat line on the table. ‘Then 1989 comes up. I start getting in the papers because I’m being protested, and the sales hugely go up, and in one year it sells more copies than its sold in the previous five years.’ ‘You’d think people would understand that this is really counterproductive’, he concludes, wryly, smirking at his opponents lack of strategy, their ironic blindness to the true consequences of their actions.

Academic philosophy is certainly under an obligation to challenge such ways of protesting, and do so vigorously. ‘And it’s disappointing’, Singer reflects, ‘that actually some philosophers seem to be embracing it in various ways… It’s contrary to basic philosophical idea that if somebody says something that you disagree with, you argue against them, and you show why they’re wrong, you make your objections.

To Singer, the more troubling challenges to utilitarianism are its more local threats: those ‘about whether utilitarianism is the right form of consequentialism.’ Perhaps, there are values other than happiness that are intrinsically good. ‘I’m someone who actually cares a lot about preserving nature, but I get into debates with some environmentalists, who think that biodiversity is an intrinsic good, not just an instrumental good… I’m somewhat troubled by those objections.’ Another tension, often ignored or unnoticed, at the heart of ethical dispute is over how far it is the role of moral theory to remold man, and make him anew, and how far any theory must accept him as he is found. This is a problem for Singer. As Alan Ryan once remarked, ‘Singer is an interesting and important fellow, but I am afraid that human beings just aren't put together the way that he wishes they were.’ There seems a sense, still, in which to be a fullyfledged utilitarian involves an unacceptable kind of schizophrenia – dividing the individual against his sense of self by committing him to an impossibly demanding standard of impartiality. ‘Yes’, Singer admits, ‘there is this tension, and I just think that it’s probably true that we are somewhat divided in that way, because, if you understand our evolutionary origins it’s not surprising that we should be’. We are not evolved to ‘reason abstractly’; such a facility is rather layered ‘on top of our biological nature’, giving rise to inescapable ‘constraints.’ Singer’s professional conflicts, however, are as nothing to those he faces from public, less alive to the subtleties of his position. A letter published in the Princeton Alumni Weekly upon Singer’s appointment to the Bioethics chair puts the opposition view nicely. ‘Nothing I have seen or heard epitomises the decline of Western civilisation so much as the hiring of Peter Singer to teach in the university's Center for Human Values.’ In Practical Ethics, however, he documents a sinister episode of challenge, embodied in a series of protests that followed him throughout a series of speaking engagements in Germany in the late 80s. Rights activists, weighed down by the heavy burden of a history only half understood, saw in Singer’s admittedly idiosyncratic views on euthanasia the long shadow of eugenics and the Third Reich. They agitated for Singer to be disinvited, and, on the occasions when he was allowed to

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Displacements



A New Poem by Simon Armitage Some nights we wander down to the quay to gawp at the super-yachts moored in the bay overnight, configurations of chrome and glass with permanent staff in matching gilets and shorts, a cool thousand euros per cubic foot, unmoved by the tipsy slosh of the waves. But the bigger dream is the one vessel of rosewood and brass, some grand old craft standing high in the water, glimpses of chandeliers, a wife and daughter in matching pashminas descending banistered stairs, verandas to all three decks. No touching, though – you’ll tarnish the mirrored finish, the high glaze. On the dirt track walking home from the shore there’s a roadside shrine shaped as a small white chapel beaconed with candlelight. You can slide your arm through the open door and down the aisle till your fingers are four villagers, women huddled around the priest; past midnight now, the horizon drowned out and the last fishing boat still not back from the sea.

aris, 8th December, 1922. In the Théâtre Antoine, Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus is having its opening night. The audience grow rowdy at elements they did not expect from an evening at the theatre: there is a ballet of skeletons and singing fish, characters rise to heaven or break out into burlesque, and a review in the New York Times of the next day informs us that ‘[it] attempts to convince the audience that earthworms are just as fond of music as human beings and easily tamed’. By the third act, the crowd are heckling, whistling, throwing coins, and arguing with the actors. Yet, sat among the audience that night are a group of Dadaists, all admirers of the author, and keen to defend him: up jump Vitrac, Leiris, Breton, Aragon and others, who join in the fighting in an attempt to protect the actors and stage (three nights later, Breton will be arrested for an overvigorous ‘defence’ of another performance). Sat to one side, Raymond Roussel silently observes the angry public and the eventual Surrealists; both incomprehensible to this author who somehow, through images of muttering corpses and parrots’ tongues, dreamt of global success. My soul is a strange factory Roussel is probably not a familiar name to most. It was unknown to me until one day while chatting with a tutor, when a mention of language games prompted him to lean over and dig out an encyclopaedia of French literature, searching fussily for the right entry:

A Soul is a Strange Factory Gaby Mancey-Jones Raymond Roussel never tried to be readable, but never had to try to be fascinating. His bizarre inventions capture the imagination in their maniacal whimsy - and unlock our own inner child as well. ‘Perfect, here we are!’. I only got a glance – dandyism, addiction to barbiturates, world travel – before the book was snapped shut and the conversation moved on. Fortunately, it was a memorable glance, and I sought out his work. Those first impressions were fleshed out. I discovered an eccentric and deeply troubled man stranded at the turn of the 20th century. Born in 1877, he led a life as strange as his fiction, although certainly easier to digest. I read about a severe fear of tunnels, a habit of only wearing collars once, and a great black vehicle in which he travelled the globe (neglecting to look out of the window in favour of his meticulous writing). He wrote near-unreadable books while dreaming of popular acclaim: worshipping Jules Verne, he reads more like a proto-Pynchon. That quick glance at the encyclopaedia entry was my own initiation into the small cult of Roussel admirers. Mark Ford opens his biography of the man, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (2000) with a description of a meeting a fellow fan: ‘I felt

like a neophyte who has just made his first successful contact with another member of a secret order he has recently joined;. The machine knew how to recreate the same work indefinitely, without help or surveillance In this Rousselian secret order, mechanical imagery is everywhere. Over and over again in his work, the image of the art-machine appears; in 'Mon me', a poem written at 17, he compares his soul to a vast and infernal factory. Miners and factory hands unearth and churn out poetry: ‘Ils saisissent à la surface/ Les vers déjà formés un peu’ (From the surface they seize/the verses, already part-formed). It recurs yet more frequently in his later, stranger novels. In Locus Solus (1914), the reader is led around the vast home of a genius inventor named Canterel. Amongst his creations is a ‘pavingbeetle’, suspended by a balloon, which lays out mosaics of human teeth: ‘The contours and the proportions varied endlessly – immense molars and monstrous canines side by side with nearimperceptible milk teeth. Metallic reflections blossomed here and there from silver or gold fillings’. Art is detached from the need for a creator in Locus Solus – objects multiply themselves. In the square at the centre of the fictitious village in Impressions of Africa (1910) stands a statue of Immanuel Kant which, when a magpie lands on a special perch, illuminates his head: One divined the presence of countless reflectors, placed facing in every direction inside the head. So great was the violence with which the bright rays, representing the fires of genius, escaped from their incandescent source… Each time the bird’s weight was applied to the lever, it seemed as though some transparent idea was born in the thinker’s brain, as it blazed suddenly with light.

The 29 Steps

A Diary by Jess Brown A Mother's Poetic Touch ‘But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how Except in the minds of those who will call it Now? The children. The children. And how does our garden grow? With waving hands – oh, rarely in a row – And flowering faces. And brambles that we can no longer allow.’

ublic exams. In those heady, hormonal moments before you wobbled up to your desk, which in my case was apparently a half-price one-man picnic table, before you unzipped your transparent pencil case, jammed with more black ball-points than students sitting in the exam hall, before you wrote your name (and wondered whether you knew even that), before all this, did you think about a fragment of poetry that had been nowhere near any kind of syllabus for perhaps the last fifty years? I did. ‘Write now for the sky Write for the arc of the sky And may no black lead letter Veil your literature.’

Let it be explained that my mother is a headmistress and has Firm Ideas about education. And by that I do not mean that she fed me pureed goji berries through a tube and tattooed my exam syllabi onto my arms. She largely left me to my own (often misled, always erratic) devices when it came to homework and revision. But that spring, when the world seemed awash with ‘revision hacks’ and grating Guardian articles about ‘whirlwind teaching’, my mother gave me a poem about learning, and continued to do so for the next three years with every exam I took – 29 so far, all bluetacked onto my bedroom wall. I’ll wager it taught me more about education than BBC Bitesize ever did or could.

‘I dwell in Possibility… spreading wide my narrow Hands.’ I think education is exciting because it is a byword for possibility. I’m always appalled to hear stories about people being forbidden to take certain combinations of subjects because they didn’t fit together. As someone who avoided most subjects like the plague as soon as I could, this may sound hypocritical, but it depresses me to know that so many people still narrow their prospects because they think it will aid them in some dusty inherited career path, rather than out of passion for the course. I couldn’t count the number of times my mother has told me of her students gritting their teeth to do medicine or law at university according to their parents’ wishes. Educational opportunity is so precious that it seems criminal to close off possibilities prematurely. ‘I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder That you would neither cajole nor ignore.’ A quote from Seamus Heaney’s ‘Act of Union’, left on my bed before a biology exam. Consider the lines as spoken by personified Knowledge, and you have the looming monster we all face before the start of revision. One of the most terrifying things, I think, about the way students are taught to treat knowledge, is exactly this issue of ‘cajoling or ignoring’ – that’s what most of us try to do. A teacher named Thomas Rogers wrote recently in TES news about this: ‘we send the message that pupils’ aggregated effort over two years is more important than in the last two weeks...I sometimes worry that in our current system, exams are about the outcome rather than the learning. Funnily enough, this has ended up being to the detriment of both.’ Many of us spent traumatically long study leaves making elaborate multi-hued towers of notes. By the time that was done, the exam was the next morning and we didn’t know a sorry word of it – we’d been too busy highlighting and following our head of year’s advice to make sure we gave ourselves treats every twenty minutes (excessive). That was ignoring. Others of us would do countless ‘open-book’ practice papers or go over stuff we already knew in a final exertion

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There are yet more art-machines in this novel, in particular that created by Louise Montalescot in the final display of Les Incomparables, the group of stranded geniuses in the text. Her photosensitive creation captures a landscape, then paintbrushes attached to a wheel transfer it to canvas. There is also the inventor Bedu’s ‘precious machine borne out of his industrious perseverance’: an impossible tapestry machine which weaves out of rushing water shining scenes of the biblical Flood. As with clockwork Kant, the process of creation is depersonalised – there is no transcendent genius to be found here. Music is also mechanized. Locus Solus features a worm-shaped music machine which convulses drops of water onto the strings of a zither. Roussel compares it to ‘a miniaturized version of the componium of the Brussels Conservatoire’, pointing to the bizarre real-life inventions of his own time. This strange contraption was a variation on the orchestrion, a machine made to imitate an orchestra through the rolls of music it played. The componium was unique in that it played a random stream of muzak by endlessly combining random notes, creating a never-to-be-repeated tune. In this respect, one may begin to better understand what J. A. Duncan refers to when he discusses Roussel’s ‘sophisticated contrivances – which have nothing to do with utility but mock the age of machines by the absurdity underlying their apparent ingenuity’. Despite the remarkable advances in technology being made in his time (vacuum cleaners, combustion engines, radios and helicopters) Roussel tends to interpret these wonders as a kind of magic. Instead of weapons or washing machines, he focuses on making a comparison to one odd muzakmaker now relegated to a museum. It is important to remember his own circumstances in this respect. A pampered man-child, he was the wealthiest author of his time. He had no need to interact with the utility of the new machines which furnished his lavish lifestyle – indeed, he went so far as to refuse to eat food that showed signs of serration. Tomatoes would have to appear as though they had been parted out of sheer self-will. The sign of human effort, of the interference of a tool like a knife, was unthinkable – little wonder that his creations never venture into the realms of usefulness.

to convince ourselves that this was revision and we didn’t need to, you know, memorise, anything really. That was cajoling, comforting but fruitless. ‘I remembered what I had forgotten a little fragment of eternity. … memory is the all of everything and the zero of nothing.’ It’s easy to forget (ironically) that the reason we are taught and forced to memorise for exams isn’t just to pass them – it is because the knowledge we glean doing so is something we take with us through life. Yes, knowledge devoid of relevance, application and imagination is pretty dry, but who cares if you’re clever and know nothing? Chris Icarus’ idea of ‘a little fragment of eternity’ sums up, I think, the value of memorising. I don’t want a return to rote learning, nor the short-term grasping at swathes of vacant facts that exams so often seem to necessitate. My mum always taught me that my work – that is, academic study – was one of the few things that would always be all mine. Knowledge is something you can get hold of and hang onto, more so even than the grades it might earn for you, which fade into irrelevance with every passing year. ‘O help thou my weak wit, and sharpen my dull tong.’ Behind many a botched exam is a parent who didn’t shut up about an A*. Part of what I delighted in, when I found each poem that my mum had left for me, was the fact that she plainly wasn’t thinking about results day, but about the poem. I could think about my coming exam without the weight of her worry, and be left afterwards with the poem as a marker and memento of my work, rather than a single letter. The poems meant that my learning never ended with the exam, but began when I got home and had time to mull over my mother’s offerings. Her captions too were sources of delight or hilarity. They range from rather desperate pseudo-scientific contributions: ‘on your chemistry

Like the componium, random chance is at the heart of Roussel’s work. It is not just the images which are mechanized: the whole system by which he wrote was a tightly regulated game of chance. The books were constructed according to a complex system of homophones: ‘I chose two similar words. For example, billard (billiard) and pillard (looter). Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almost identical sentences thus. The two sentences found, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first and finish by the second.’ A story beginning with ‘Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard’ (the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table) must somehow end with ‘Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard’ (letters written by a white man about the hordes of the old plunderer). This was not the only method he used: certain images are also created from homophones – ‘These last three couplings of words gave me a statue of a Spartan slave, made out of whalebone corsets, rolling on rails made from calf ’s lung…’ The never-ending variety of images that Roussel finds in this system of word-games is the result of both a strict writing system and the randomness of homophones. Roussel’s infinity isn’t sublime or poetic – it is the endlessness of a random number generator. Was Roussel himself a type of art-machine? He was at several points in his life subsumed entirely by his manic need to write. One can picture him, monomaniacal, bent over his writing desk in a little darkened carriage while a Tahitian sunset burns outside. There is a remarkable quote detailing the most passionate of these phases when, aged 19, he spent six months gripped in a frenzy of writing, convinced of his genius: 'Whatever I wrote was surrounded by rays of light; I used to close the curtains, for I was afraid the shining rays emanating from my pen might escape into the outside world through even the smallest chink'. He was machine-like, too, in the curious emotional detachment that permeates his work. Nicholas Jenkins, reviewing the detailed minutiae present in Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique (1932), notes the significance of an infected uvula: ‘A distasteful glimpse into the depths of an infected mouth is the nearest that Roussel’s writing ever comes to entering the

inner world of another person.’ Roussel truly believed himself to be apart from all those around him. There is a fantastic story of the poet Péret attempting to contact him, only to be brushed off with the assertion that ‘he did not class himself as belonging to any school’. This detachment could often turn dark, particularly in the months leading up to his death from overdose. Addicted to barbiturates in a hotel in Palermo, Michel Leiris describes him then: ‘handsome and elegant, but a bit heavier, somewhat slumped, and he spoke as if from a great distance’. In the ever-widening distance, he seems to have been a flesh and blood precursor to those melancholic, neurotic robots that crop up in science fiction now and again – a very French paranoid android. Roussel’s mixed legacy is painfully apparent considering the gap between ambitions and reception. While popular literature has not been kind to him, the rarefied world of installation has welcomed him with open arms. Although it was no condolence to him, there is no denying the influence he has had on visual artists to this day. Ideas from his work can be seen in that of Marcel Duchamp, a dedicated follower who went to Roussel’s plays, to Pierre Huyghe’s later installations incorporating live animals (much like the worm attached to the zither in Locus Solus). In particular, his influence is most visible in the mechanical moving creations of Jean Tinguely. Tinguely never explicitly stated that he had been inspired by Roussel, but often did implicitly acknowledge it. This inspiration is undeniable when looking at the former’s 1950s Métamatics, a series of clanking great iron machines armed with paintbrushes. These are Roussel’s art-machines brought to life. There is another, more subjective reason for which the artist calls to mind the author. At a retrospective of Tinguely’s work in Amsterdam, after I had just read Impressions of Africa for the first time, I was struck by two things. The first was the deeply Rousselian nature of much of his sculpture, particularly the smaller pieces made of junk: a radio attached to a tin can and a dead stoat, playing music from jangling scrap metal, would not have seemed out of place in Locus Solus. But the second was the reception from the visitors in the gallery: whole families ooh-ing and aah-ing at the moving machines, small children running between them laughing,

exam, best of luck, Je (Je = Jess, a pure element, which reacts to exams to form pure gold!)’ To gutsy stabs at French before my oral: ‘tu es tres magnifique. Avoir du plaisir et Bon chance! Maman.’ Does it mean anything? Honestly I wouldn’t know, I gratefully scraped a B. But what did it matter when I’d read a hilarious poem called ‘Le Cancre’ (‘The Dunce’) that morning? My mother had shared her own ignorance to encourage me in my pursuit of knowledge. On our firmer ground (humanities) her notes to the poems become surer, more meaningful – sentences that still ring in my head when I feel overwhelmed or demotivated – ‘Enjoy your English A Level, poppet. This one really is fun. Love, Mummy.’ Or, ‘Shakespeare’s portrayal of the arch-Tudor to take you through your Tudor paper.’ I entered my History A Level with not just reams of dates running through my mind, but with those dates furnished by Henry VIII’s imagined words, reverberating in the silent, poised exam hall. ‘The gentleman is learn’d, and a most rare speaker, To nature none more bound: his training such, That he may furnish and instruct great teachers. And never seek for aid out of himself … this man so complete.’ There’s been a recent call for ‘functional skills’ in subjects like English at school. But English hasn’t got very much to do with functionality at all – it’s one of those subjects which encapsulates the idea of education for the sake of education, and to replace it with something entirely different is to remove the soul from learning. Why else does the mayor put Poems on the Underground? People often say they don’t like English, but have you ever heard someone whinge that they hate stories, or emotions? That’s all English is. I think people are put off English for life when tragically basic or absurdly complex texts are set on school syllabi in attempts to make literature courses ‘accessible’ or to cover the ‘seminal’ – more words that ignore how endlessly open and utterly personal literature is. Like the fragmented poems mum gave me, literature is what you make of it: random scraps of paper, or if you like, a guide to life.

students and toddlers and grandparents clapping together when a particularly magnificent piece whirred unexpectedly into motion. Here was a 1950s take on the paving-beetle, the wormzither, the paintbrush-wheel, and here too was the popular all-ages acclaim which Roussel had so desperately sought. In the delighted reactions of children, I also began to understand more about Roussel’s machines. Having spent so long contemplating their significance in art and industrialisation, it was easy to forget that the closest thing to a useless, entertaining, fantastical machine is a child’s toy. After all, this was the man obsessed with authors like Jules Verne and Pierre Loti, the man who would have his chauffeur drive out to the countryside where he would curl up in the back seat with a copy of Around the World in Eighty Days or Les Trois Dames de la Kasbah, and lose himself in their childish worlds. Their influence finally showed on my last reading of Locus Solus, hinting at a populism that was never to be. The story of a king, travelling deep

‘We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’ To yap on about my mother a bit more, she sometimes sets an unorthodox punishment for her students. Rather than sitting in a numbing detention, contemplating the carnal sin of not handing in homework, she makes them write a poem. Lots of them absolutely hate it, but they probably learn something. Another of mum’s favourite poetry-prompts encapsulates, I think, the sense of exploration that she has never stopped encouraging – in her students, in her daughter, and in herself. As a young English teacher, she would ask her class to write poems to their future husbands and wives. The results were mesmerizing, and I remember sitting in pyjamas as a little girl, flipping through the exercise books as mum marked them. The intricacy, the effort, the little illustrations and rubbings-out, were fascinating and inspiring – they were fragments of self discovery. They certainly weren’t masterpieces, nor did they contribute to any sort of official grade, but I bet some of the students will – or did – show them to their husbands and wives. ‘But there is no competition – There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again … but perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.’ My education, my view on education, and my mother’s view on education, do not constitute a formula that should be forced down the nation’s throat. Nor do I hold up the successes I have had and pinpoint them on a sheaf of crumpled poems I was given. I don’t look down on my mishaps and blame them on the Department of Education. But what I have to credit, and advocate, is the creativity and the coolness with which I have been supported throughout my academic endeavors. My father

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into a marble-and-gold cavern to carve out a message for his future heir, read as though it were a forgotten folktale, as did the ‘popular and moral story’ of a Norwegian duke battling to earn the love of fair Christel, married to the evil baron Skjelderup. The exoticism of Loti’s Orientalist works is clearly visible in the ‘Africa’ that Roussel conceives, separate as it is from the reality of the continent, and he takes the focus on fantasy at the expense of characterisation (a not uncommon feature of these adventure novels) to its extreme. His work was a child’s adventure story turned inside-out. So too was his life, recalling Larkin’s ‘hideous inverted childhood’, whether cocooned in the black vehicle in which he travelled the world, or in the warm irreality of barbiturates. In light of all this infantile fancy, the machines that dominate his work can be seen less as a comment on technology, and more as a distorted toybox: woven water, singing fish and all. 

has always asked one thing of me – that I try my best. After a physics exam, I came home and told him I’d cried at my desk and skipped a page: out came the mantra ‘as long as you’ve tried your best.’ The genius of this simple condition was twofold: it gave me a way out; it also shifted everything onto me – results, responsibility, and the truth – that only I would ever know if I’d tried my best. The only competition, therefore, that I was ever truly alive to, was one with myself, and I didn’t know what I was beating. There is something terrifying and liberating about having no idea what you’re striving for, no standard to uphold but your own. It has led me down paths that the syllabus alone never could have done. ‘I am the sum of the ages beginning before my mother, before my grandmother, and before my grandmother’s mother I am the product of their matriarchal choices, the quotidian of their actions, reflections, and self-images. I am the difference of their generations. And I bequeath the equation of this inheritance to the matrices of my living legacies.’ Once, as a soul-destroyingly pretentious child, I wrote in my journal about a book my nana had read my mum, which had then been read to me – I think it was Winnie the Pooh – and I called this intellectual inheritance ‘a bracelet from God’. You wince, but thanks to my maternal forebears, I began to realize why I was being educated, and why I needed to be grateful for it. I was encouraged to see what I had learnt and knew as ‘fragments I have shored against my ruin’, and they imbue my life with meaning. In the words of Wendy Cope – ‘I hope you make sense of the notes.’ 

‘H

e was always so plausible. Many people have believed that his version of events was the true one, give or take a few murders, a few beautiful seductresses, a few one-eyed monsters. Even I believed him, from time to time. I knew he was tricky and a liar, I just didn’t think he would play his tricks and try out his lies on me.’ So Penelope describes Odysseus in The Penelopiad (2005), Margaret Atwood’s retelling of the Odyssey from her perspective. Every new version of a well-known story is burdened by the need to justify itself as an act of retelling. It’s difficult to bring a figure like Penelope onto the page without it seeming trivial, over-resonant, or self-consciously revisionary. The reader is held in oddly smug meta-suspense to see if Atwood will pull it off. But the problem with her retelling is that, though it takes great pains to justify itself, her Penelope is so implausible. Even the most steadfast lover of the original should be open to retellings of ancient stories. Their survival and continuing relevance is largely due to the fact that they have been readdressed, readjusted and reinterpreted so many times. But Atwood’s approach is insensitively pugnacious. In her introduction, she states her project clearly. ‘The story as told in the Odyssey doesn’t hold water’, she writes, ‘there are too many inconsistencies’. We are immediately invited to wonder whether her persistently explanatory, demythologising approach holds water either. Atwood’s explanations of the physical aspects of being dead (her Penelope is delivering us a monologue from the Underworld) are heavy-handed. They remind me of those odd moments in Paradise Lost when Milton spells out exactly how his angels’ physiology and digestion works. Atwood’s attempts to describe the modern without using modern terms sound embarrassed: ‘the new ethereal-wave system that now encircles the globe’; ‘flat, illuminated surfaces that serve as domestic shrines’. When the murdered maids address us sarcastically as ‘dear educated minds’, it’s difficult to stomach amid all the self-conscious jokiness.

Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (2012) was similarly iconoclastic, starring an angry and non-virginal mother of Jesus. Like Atwood’s, his revisionist project was clear, if delivered with his trademark subtlety and control. But House of Names, Tóibín’s new retelling of the Oresteia (Aeschylus’ trilogy of tragedies), is so reticent and non-confrontational in its revisions that the big question from its opening is one of purpose. Why has he chosen to retell this story? He offers a narrative of repression, tyranny and imprisonment, in which Clytemnestra’s description of Orestes’

The Burden of Retelling Katie Mennis Inside The Wave Helen Dunmore, Bloodaxe, 2017 House of Names Colm Tóibín, Viking, 2017

Colm Tóibín's new novel and Helen Dumore's latest poetry collection both revamp ancient stories – but do they justify themselves as retellings? Is plausibility always lost to a strong ideological purpose? education – learning ‘to pull the reins of power, relax them, pull them again, tighten them when the time was right, exerting sweet control’ – works well as a description of Tóibín’s style, albeit a dark one. The novel’s main success is in being scrupulously convincing. Agamemnon’s influence over Orestes is carefully mapped out, as are Clytemnestra’s fatal mistakes with Electra: she says, ‘I know now that not concentrating on her and her alone was my first mistake with her.’ This fills in gaps in our knowledge of the story, without being over-explanatory. We begin with Clytemnestra’s point of view, in the aftermath of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, with the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra lying outside. But are we in the world of the Agamemnon, in the same way as we find ourselves in an amended Odyssey in The Penelopiad? There are a few moments that seem like corrections of an original narrative, like when Clytemnestra insists that it’s Iphigenia’s cries in death that ‘will be remembered for ever. Nothing else.’ There’s a moving scene when an ordinary man is forced to drink poisoned water in front of his ordinary family, which shows us the overlooked collateral damage of the celebrated tragic saga. But, overall, the novel seems to present itself as a kind of ur-story – that mythical thing, the truth – without forcing it down our throats or presenting itself as revisionary. I wonder whether Tóibín’s aim is simply to introduce the story to new readers. If the reader of The Penelopiad must be a ‘dear educated mind’ to be ‘in on’ its revisions, who is the intended reader of House of Names? I speak to Helen Dunmore, whose latest poetry collection, Inside the Wave, is also haunted by figures from the Odyssey. Her reasons for this are clear from the poems. She uses ancient stories as one kind of coping mechanism: they have a timelessness that is helpful to us, particularly in the extreme circumstances of her terminal illness. One of the most delicately handled aspects of these poems is that she comes to terms with the finite voyage of life without trying to set the narrative of her own life straight: she

writes of those ‘heroes and warriors / Who have left their mark on the earth,’ but includes herself among more ‘ordinary souls’. I ask Dunmore whether she is ever motivated by a desire to leave a mark. She says, ‘going onwards has been much more important to me than stopping to define what I have done or to ask whether I have made any mark by my work or by my life.’ It’s easy to understand why Odysseus’ journey means so much to her. Dunmore explains, ‘in my mind the voyage itself, for all its perils, becomes a place of safety. As long as the ships are cutting through the wine-dark sea, there can be no disillusionment. Wily Odysseus perhaps knows this. As long as the train wheels turn, the ship buffets through the waves, the car eats up lonely miles, then nothing can be expected of the voyager beyond the voyage itself.’ The Homeric figures of Inside the Wave are thoroughly ‘barnacled’ and humanised: ‘not heroes, any of us, / Only familiars, / Of grey shores and the sea-pulse’. Dunmore treats them with a healthy disrespect and familiarity, whilst acknowledging the subtlety of Homer’s treatment too. ‘If they were stereotypical heroes,’ she says, ‘I would be much less interested in them, but they are compromised creatures, like all of us, going through the trials of life as we all must. They give hope but they also understand the fragility of life.’ Her tendency to demythologise is wonderfully unaggressive. In ‘My Daughter as Penelope,’ Dunmore presents us with a Penelope played by a seven-year-old, but treats the performance with awe: she tells me, ‘the children’s acting was pure, vehement, often spine-tingling. Penelope’s force as a woman came across through the body of a child who unconsciously adopted abrupt, imperious gestures as she faced her suitors.’ Dunmore’s poems demonstrate a sensitive scepticism of the idea that Homer’s heroes are always larger and more magnificent than life. Tóibín’s characters often show a harsher scepticism, seeming to participate in his novelistic realism. The cynical Clytemnestra sets up an image of Homeric familial love,

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reminiscent of the parting of Hector and Andromache in the Iliad, only to dismiss it as an impossibility. She says, ‘if anyone then had wanted to know what love looked like, if anyone going into battle needed an image of love to take with them to protect them or spur them on, it was here for them … I saw it and I am certain of it. … But it was false.’ This is a harsh world from which the gods have more or less departed. In such a naturalised and atheistic narrative, the occasional supernatural element is a surprise, such as the magical robe Clytemnestra uses to bind Agamemnon before murdering him. Tóibín reworks another Homeric image into Clytemnestra’s view of the gods’ distance: ‘They care about human desires and antics in the same way that I care about the leaves of a tree. I know the leaves are there, they wither and grow again and wither, as people come and live and then are replaced by others like them. … I do not deal with their desires.’ In Homer, the simile of falling leaves for generations of men calls for bold acceptance in the face of death, not unlike the sentiment of Dunmore’s collection. Tóibín’s reworkings of his sources like this are seamless and don’t shout to be heard. One thing House of Names and The Penelopiad have in common is their genre-bending. Oddly, Atwood takes an epic poem, and transforms it into a novella, but structures it like a Greek tragedy, with a chorus interrupting Penelope’s monologue every few chapters. There’s a lot going on here, and it makes me wonder whether Atwood is being much more radical than Euripides was when he put Helen or Medea centre stage two and a half thousand years ago. Tóibín novelises a tragic trilogy, in three parts: the first from Clytemnestra’s point of view; the second a third-person account of Orestes; the final section a combination of Electra, Orestes and (briefly) Clytemnestra’s voices. House of Names demonstrates what novels do best, compared to other genres. Tóibín has a particular ear for things unsaid, repressed and sidelined. The front of the eponymous house acts as the back of the stage in Aeschylus’ plays, with most of the action – including the murders – occurring inside it, out of view. The novel form allows Tóibín to present spaces like this as labyrinthine and dungeon-like. The prophetess Cassandra delivers her vision of her coming death in a tone of quiet fear inside the house, rather than hysterically on stage: ‘She lowered her voice as she mentioned murder. She could see murder, she said; she could smell murder.’ Occasionally Tóibín subtly nods to the stage, like when Clytemnestra prepares ‘a great choreography of welcome and good cheer’ for Agamemnon, and ‘we, each of us, rehearsed our roles.’ Tóibín once joked in a blog post that he has never understood metaphors or symbols;

compared with Aeschylus’ complex chains of metaphor, his language is certainly sparse. This a world in which every move is measured, quiet, menacing.

House of Names, Inside the Wave and The Penelopiad also share an element of genderbending in their treatment of classical stories. Atwood’s is a feminist treatment of the Odyssey, and one of her aims is to draw attention to the overlooked execution of twelve maids near its close. But in her version the maids remain mere outlines of characters, and her assumptions about Homer’s treatment of female characters often smacks of sexist criticism. Atwood reads Homer’s Penelope – insensitively, I would suggest – as a one-dimensional ‘faithful wife’. Penelope’s rants about her bitch of a cousin, Helen, in chapters such as ‘Helen Ruins My Life,’ in fact sounds a lot like some of the worst moments in the misogynistic tradition of Helen’s reception. The translation of Ovid’s Heroides by Clare Pollard – a Bloodaxe poet like Dunmore, whose latest collection, Incarnation, came out recently – in 2013 was a more successful response to this sort of misogynistic reception. For Pollard, Ovid’s collection of letters from the abandoned women of myth has been dismissed by misogynist critics as a trivialisation and domestication of great legends. Pollard’s translation of Ovid’s Penelope is more mature and realistic than Atwood’s; she was a young girl when Odysseus went away, but he’ll come back to a fully-grown woman. It’s full of marital in-jokes, exasperation and tenderness. Pollard associates the Heroides with other texts that retell history from a woman’s perspective. But, I ask her, if translating the Heroides was for her a feminist act, was this complicated at all by Ovid’s ‘transvestism’ – the fact that she was translating a man writing women? Pollard says yes, but ‘the fact I was a woman, writing as a man as a woman, made the whole project more nuanced. I like complication. I like the way it makes you ask the question, well, what does a woman sound like anyway? Why do we assume male and female voices and perspectives are different? I was hyper aware when translating that gender is a construct. And I think that’s in the text – these heroes and heroines of myth

are constantly having to perform masculinity or femininity.’ And, though it’s complicated, it works. Since the first part of House of Names is spoken by Clytemnestra, we may expect that we’re in for what Pollard would call an act of sustained ‘literary transvestism’. This is, after all, what Tóibín was doing in The Testament of Mary. But the opening monologue by Clytemnestra is in fact the least successful part of the novel. Something odd is going on with gender in House of Names, more complicated even than Pollard’s project. Aeschylus’ Agamemnon is dominated by Clytemnestra’s control of language and the stage; the role of her lover, Aegisthus, in the double murder is played down. In Tóibín’s retelling, surprisingly, we find a very powerful Aegisthus and a more traditional powerdynamic to the relationship. In gender terms, this is a less radical version than Aeschylus’. We get hints of Clytemnestra’s old manipulation, but she’s so much more subdued: ‘It might be easy if Aegisthus learned to trust me. Perhaps the worst was over. Soon, it would all seem right. Soon, I would make Aegisthus believe that he could have what he wanted.’ Tóibín writes a lot of homosexuality into the ‘Orestes’ section, recalling Madeline Miller’s homosexual version of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus in The Song of Achilles (2011). In the final part of the novel, when Orestes learns that his girlfriend Ianthe’s child is not his, he says, ‘But the child is in you, not in them … And the child grew here in our house and will be born in our house … It is the baby that grew in you. It’s your baby.’ This is an inversion of Athene’s argument at the end of the Oresteia, when she casts the deciding vote to acquit Orestes of matricide. Athene says that she honours the male in all things, and dismisses the female role in child-bearing, since she is motherless herself. Tóibín switches the genders, but it’s still falsely consoling. Orestes has seemed a bit clueless about reproduction throughout the novel. His assertion that the male seed now doesn’t matter removes him from the future lineage of the house of names. Tóibín’s isn’t a feminist retelling like Atwood’s, or a homosexual reading like Miller’s. It is more nuanced than these.

A Faceless Icon A Diary by Susie finlay

Why do we still retell these classical stories? For Dunmore, it’s about the comforting thought that people, in our mortality and capacity for empathy, haven’t changed much over the last three thousand years. Atwood does it to set the narrative straight and reclaim female figures, but in so doing underestimates the sensitivity of their treatment in classical literature (if not in classical society). Pollard also wants to set the narrative straight, but respects how radical her original is – which is a necessity, given that hers is a translation, rather than a revisionist retelling. Tóibín’s reasons remain elusive. It is possible to detect echoes of Irish history in his ancient Greece, as is often the case when Irish writers approach Greek tragedy. We enjoy series

Me and Miss Winehouse

here is something incongruous about the setting of Amy Winehouse: A Family Portrait. An exhibition held at the Jewish Museum in London, it is encircled by gallery spaces displaying stock images of wholesome Jewish family life, overseen by whiskery octogenarian guards. One can’t help but feel that this tribute to Amy Winehouse is somewhat out of place. It’s the equivalent of curating a Rubens exhibition in an East London warehouse. It strikes me as a jarring, almost disingenuous experience. But this is the very essence of the exhibition. It attempts to recontextualise Winehouse, removing her from the vast stage of celebrity, and, for want of a less cringe-inducing cliché: sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. Instead, she is ushered by her brother and the curator of the exhibition, Alex Winehouse, into the arena of suburban family life. This ‘family portrait’ is the antithesis of the portrayal of Winehouse to which we have grown accustomed. The beehive is replaced with a schoolgirl ponytail. Plastered across a wall, in place of the network of disastrous boyfriends is a graphic of Winehouse’s convoluted family tree. Photos of Alex’s Bar-Mitzvah party replace those of raucous nights out in Camden. Behind a display case, Winehouse’s own liquor cabinet is filled with a heap of Puzzler magazines and sudoku books. Not a bottle in sight. Even the background music – Mickey Mouse Club and Frank Sinatra – emphasises the overarching dominance of family influence. Here is a certain attempt to reclaim a celebrity as a daughter. This is familial retaliation against contemporary tabloid coverage, against the scrutiny of the public gaze, and surely against Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary Amy, which unforgivingly exposed the Winehouse family’s complicity in the drama of Amy’s life. Mitch Winehouse, her father, dubbed the film a ‘disgrace’.

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Mortify

Annie Hayter the round inside the cave is smooth like a baby’s thumbnail, gleaming from the light of human skin, which seems to shine dully, amongst this pearling inner, betrayed by the lumpen gritty piles that shingle its floors, make a doggerel of the sullen curves, impregnable as the Carmelite nuns of Klaustur. these walls have been flayed, by the beatings of time and use, they form one huge seal of scar, a rocky cicatrix needled by crosses and whips of sand, lacquered by salt water fed on the taste of bird, lamb, fish, cooked on spits when the local men took shelter against the storm, or when the young boys left home at midnight, to seek adventure, and got trapped at high tide. you can almost taste the crackle of burnt pig skin, see the roasted outline on the floor, the marring of a round black smudge married to this solid whiteness.

I am reminded of John Berger’s seminal 1972 television series, Ways of Seeing, which was later adapted into a book of the same name. The introductory scene is most memorable. The viewer watches helplessly as Berger takes a knife and seemingly dismembers Botticelli’s Mars and Venus. The isolated section of the painting he has just cut out then appears on the screen as a postcard reproduction. Berger’s point is that the context of the image is imperative. Pinning the reproduction on a corkboard in my room surrounded by other postcards, souvenirs and photos would totally mutate the original meaning of the Botticelli. ’Everything around the image is part of its meaning. Everything around it confirms and consolidates its meaning.’ Using the example of the icon, Berger elaborates upon this idea. The icon is holy not merely in itself, but also because of its religious setting. To a certain extent, the icon itself is a blank canvas. Its meaning is derived from its surroundings. Winehouse too is an icon. Though there is perhaps an attempt to make Amy a standard bearer for her religion in the exhibition’s emphasis on her Jewish heritage, I don’t mean ‘icon’ in a religious sense. But as a pop-icon, she represents a modern day equivalent. As the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris encases fragments of the Cross and Holy Crown, the admittedly less ornate display cases of the Jewish Museum seal away her guitar, Louboutin stilettos and well-thumbed Claudia Roden cookbook. Amy’s personal belongings are a contemporary saint’s relics. The stenciled image of Winehouse by street-artist Pegasus is iconography. And a visit to the exhibition becomes pilgrimage. Like Berger’s Byzantine icon, Amy’s meaning is transmutable. Framed by paparazzi snapshots of wild nights out, Winehouse is drunken mess. Framed by the commentary of Kapadia’s documentary she is a tragic victim. But equally, framed by text and mementos particularly selected by members of her family, and even through their choice of museum, she is ‘simply a little Jewish kid from North London.’ Like all representations of Amy, the exhibition is heavily curated. I find myself considering what was left out of the glass cabinets by Alex Winehouse. A slight alteration in the selection of items on display would utterly transform the impression of Amy that we are led to absorb.

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and sagas nowadays just as much as the Greeks did, and House of Names has considerable Game of Thrones-style appeal. Perhaps it is simply a sensitive novelist’s response to the desire to create back-stories for dramatic characters, as actors often do. The story of the house of Atreus is one that invites retelling, so maybe each new version shouldn’t bear such a burden of selfjustification. It’s nice for once to read a retelling that is convincing, nuanced, and doesn’t force an ideological project down our throats. But it’s hard not to wait in hope for ‘the point’ that never quite comes.

Yet however sceptical I might be towards the objectivity of this particular portrayal, I find myself drawn to it. For me, there is something comforting in the dogged mundanity of exhibition and in the persistence of Alex Winehouse to present his sister as merely a Jewish kid from North London, because it is to that dimension of Winehouse which I relate and it is there that I recognise myself. As much as icons might entrance us in their immortal unattainability, their humanity is equally attractive. This attempt of the audience to reclaim the subject in our own context is clarified by a wall of Post-it notes, upon which visitors to the exhibition are encouraged to jot down what Amy means to them. Someone, presumably from the area, dubs her a ‘Camden Queen’. Another remembers when they heard her sing live. Someone else has written that Amy once signed her guitar. The celebrity is essentially transformed into public property, as different parties project onto the icon their own contexts and perceptions of the individual. And so I come away from the exhibition feeling unsettled. The brash, unashamed confidence with which we displace Winehouse, subverting her to fit our own requirements, seems to me a violation of her identity. The lyrics of What is it About Men resonate: ‘I don't care 'bout what you got, I want it all’. Greedily, we have transformed a highly idiosyncratic poet and musician into something faceless. 

Liberalism Realised?

here are crises and there are ‘metacrises’: a system may stagger from one crisis to another whilst the mechanisms that subvert its own logic go unrecognised. We may never even get to the ‘final’ crisis that some analysts predict. So long as the inner contradictions are not acknowledged, the story will be one of cyclical failure.

John Milbank and Adrian Pabst's The Politics of Virtue (2016) attempts to name, acknowledge and pick apart various metacrises. Capitalism, democracy, nation-state politics, modern culture and education – all are living out a metacrisis of some sort. All are grounded in illusion and contradiction, whether that be the simultaneous overproduction and underprovision that typifies capitalism, the symbiosis of oligarchy and majoritarianism exhibited by modern democracy, the nihilistic void at the centre of modern cultural life, or the mixture of nationalist rhetoric and globalist economic homogenisation on the chaotic international stage. Milbank and Pabdst trace all this illusion and contradiction back to a body of ideas about human identity and society that emerged in the seventeenth century, with thinkers such as Groitus, Hobbes and Locke. They (somewhat anachronistically) call this intellectual perspective ‘liberalism’. Their book encourages us to see ‘liberalism’ as one might a Shakespearean villain whose devious plotting derails the West, causing everything to collapse into chaos and misery. The first chapter examines this coup in detail. ‘Liberalism’ abandons the idea of an ordered cosmos and instead assumes a schism between a meaningless natural order and an abstract human will that imposes meaning on the environment. And, given that nothing has intrinsic significance – ‘liberalism’, the authors say, precludes notions of substantive truth or goodness from public discussion – value comes only from exchange between atomised individuals. So: what can I literally or metaphorically buy with something? What advantage will it bring in a world of shortage and competition? Insofar as ‘liberalism’ assumes that what is most basic in us is an ego with demands that need to be guaranteed satisfaction, there will be fatal collusion between ideals of ‘negative liberty’ (the absence of constraints on individuals) and the universal commodification that goes with capitalism. Capitalism and ‘liberalism’ are partners in crime, together promoting an endless negotiation of power in this cramped but essentially empty world – the process by which we seek to create value by gaining leverage over others.

‘liberalism’ as an independent actor in human history, but the real actors are those who call themselves liberals and work to put liberal ideals into practice. Considering how these actors give it life, we may learn that liberalism, often accused of having ‘thin’ or ‘illusory’ values, in fact displays a thick array of attitudes and dispositions.

Oliver Bealby-Wright The Politics of Virtue John Milbank & Adrian Pabdst, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016 Bleak Liberalism Amanda Anderson, University of Chicago Press, 2016

Liberalism is under examination like never before, and arguments once thought closed are being revived with renewed tenacity – three new authors enter the fray. The inevitable outcome of all this is the triumph of a kind of fleshless, bodiless process of wealth creation, which produced the 2008 financial crash. In many ways, then, The Politics of Virtue is of the moment, echoing recent editorials declaring that the surge in populism constitutes a ‘crisis for liberalism’. Indeed, for Milbank and Pabdst, liberalism’s inability to recognise as politically relevant anything other than the isolated subjective individual on the one hand and the artificially supposed collective unity of ‘the people’ on the other, is to blame for the current corrosive muddle about the nature of democracy. It is to blame for the resurgence of a ‘plebiscite’ ideal, and fantasies of politics as the direct expression of unmediated demands, with all the risks of majoritarian tyranny that go with that. The book’s talk of the ‘meta-crisis of liberalism’, however, stresses that the problems of today’s liberalism will only be solved by wholesale rejection of centuries worth of intellectual assumptions. The authors tell the narrative of liberalism’s rise to demonstrate that notions we take as unquestionable are actually historically contingent and dubious. If the book is at times disturbing, it is also compelling in staunch advocacy of the road-not-taken. Milbank and Pabdst write as committed Christians whose desired ‘post-liberal’ future depends on the retrieval of long-discarded theological ideas about human identity and society. These ideas belong to a sacred, medieval worldview in which meanings are given by God for our discovery and exploration. For the modern secular liberal, meanwhile, the starting position for human identity is a solitary, speechless individual, who moves out from primitive isolation to negotiate with others, and learns language to label objects to be managed and utilised. For the Christian post-liberal, however, the human subject is already in relation with other subjects and the world – and so is also involved in securing the wellbeing of others and of the world. How

others speak to us, imagine us, nurture or fail to nurture us, does not exceed a sense of who or what we are, but is woven into the very idea of being a self.

The Politics of Virtue, however, has a theory and practice problem. Milbank and Pabdst claim that ‘the triumph of liberalism today more and more brings about the ‘war of all against all’ (Hobbes) and the idea of man as self-owning animal (Locke) that were its presuppositions.’ Practice flows neatly from theory, creating in the reality of competitive and greedy behaviour ‘illusory proof ’ for its theoretical presuppositions. But can we really blame philosophers for so much? Cynics might accuse Milbank and Pabdst of inflating their own importance as thinkers by claiming that academic culture thought its way into the dilemmas of modernity. Might we be better served by a more complex narrative that includes, in addition to ideas, the imponderable complexity of natural and social forces, and the relationship between these forces and ideas? Another way of putting it would be to ask how a liberal would react to the book’s characterisation of ‘liberalism’. I put ‘liberalism’ in quotation marks, yet the authors do not, seemingly unaware that they have given their own, uncompromisingly negative sense. We seldom get clues about what defenders of its integrity might say – whether they would accept the definitions offered here, or whether the liberal sensibility is so completely hostile to any substantive view of human virtue or collective wellbeing. This raises the issue of theory and practice in a different way. If you ask someone to explain their political philosophy, you will learn both about ideas and their lived commitment to those ideas – the difficulty of trying to practise them in certain historical conditions. Milbank and Pabdst treat

This is one argument made in a recent book by literary scholar Amanda Anderson, intriguingly titled Bleak Liberalism (2016). Anderson is unhappy with the bad press that liberalism is receiving, and mounts a novel defence by way of literature. Anderson seeks to reframe liberalism as not only a body of thought, but also a lived political commitment and a distinctive literary aesthetic. She hopes we might thereby discover its human side. Analyse a liberal novel, she says, and you will encounter ‘complexity, difficulty, variousness, ambiguity, undecidability, hermeneutic open-endedness’. Above all, you will find a pessimism or bleakness of attitude, driven by ‘awareness of all those forces and conditions that threaten the realisation of liberal ambitions’. The liberal tradition, she seeks to prove, is not as prosaic, rule-governed and naively hopeful as its critics suppose. A problem. Novels rarely endorse a political philosophy, and if they do, it is likely to be couched in reservation. Anderson’s approach risks forcing a variety of imaginative productions which happen to be written by authors who call themselves liberals into the straightjacket of a ‘liberal aesthetic’. Her treatment of E. M. Forster’s 1911 novel, Howards End, is a case in point. For Anderson, the novel’s hero is undoubtedly Margaret Schlegel, whose forthright argumentation against her husband’s prejudice helps establish the liberal community of the novel’s end. This utopia of two sisters happily raising an illegitimate child comes about, Anderson rightly insists, thanks to Margaret’s ‘liberal critique’, modelled on deliberative democracy. Anderson doesn’t consider the possibility, however, that this non-traditional farmhouse family might not be as rosy and humane as it first appears. If Forster’s ending appears to invoke the genre of utopia, its concealed Blakean ‘contrary’ is tragedy. Howards End is far bleaker than Anderson acknowledges. In the final sentence the fertility of nature is asserted when Helen celebrates ‘such a crop of hay as never!’ But Forster’s colloquial shortening of ‘as there never was’ to ‘as never’ – so that the novel ends with the word ‘never’

Faith Under Fire A Diary by Laela Zaidi Trump's Clash Crusade

t was piercingly hot summer morning in Missouri when my mother stepped into my room and announced that our family’s mosque had been burned down during the night. I shot my eyes open, and asked how it had happened. Yet even in asking, and despite losing my home in a tornado just one year prior, I quickly realised that weather was an unlikely cause. When I sat up in bed and registered the mixture of fear and sadness in my mother’s eyes, I knew this had been a deliberate act. Visiting the burnt remains of my family’s regular place of worship, I felt more anger and fear than surprise. Despite the growing number of Muslims in my sleepy Missouri hometown, most of whom are immigrants and first-generation families, Islamophobia is rampant. Less than a month prior to the arson, an attempt to burn down the building failed. Over the years, racial slurs were shouted out of car windows to Muslims en route to pray. When the first sign reading ‘Islamic Society of Joplin’ was erected outside the mosque, it was also set aflame and vandalised. The charred words were never replaced. Weeks after the fire, the sign remained outside the debris-filled property. Yet, immediately after the hate crime, there was an outpouring of support from the Christian-majority townspeople to support us following the loss of our only Muslim space. Briefly, the city turned into an interfaith, multicultural heaven. A public park ‘love’ rally was organised by a student at the local Christian college, and local

churches, as well as the synagogue, immediately offered free worship spaces for the month of Ramadan. This warm embrace did not last. Since 9/11, vitriol against the entire Muslim religion has been unshakable in in rural America. According to the billboards lining cornfields near to my hometown, my religion hates the ‘Judeo-Christian West’ with inexplicable fervour. In my part of the country, Donald Trump’s suspicion of Obama’s birth certificate made him a hero far before 2016. Trump’s suggestion that President Obama was born in a Muslim-majority country affirmed what many in Southwest Missouri already believed – that a Muslim fifth column had infiltrated the American government. Trump’s antipathy towards the Muslim faith is not a novel trend. Rather it is a worldview grounded in historical scholarship on the

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‘West versus the Rest’ or ‘Clash of Civilisations’. The clash thesis, proposed in 1992 by Samuel Huntington, held that the postCold War era would see conflict develop between ‘civilisations’. Regions bound together by history, language, culture, religion and political values would become the primary ‘fault lines’ of global conflict. Inner divisions within these blocs of the world would be superseded by an ‘us versus them’ mentality and nonWestern civilisations, especially Islam, would be most likely to mobilise against the rest of the world. In a 2014 speech to the Vatican, Steve Bannon, now White House Chief Strategist, expressed a similar view, speaking of the ‘metastasising war against ISIS’ as an all-encompassing threat to the ‘underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West’. His choice of words resembles those of Michael Flynn – who briefly served as National Security Advisor before resigning in scandal – that

– undercuts optimistic feeling. It recalls words that have recurred throughout – emptiness, abyss, darkness, panic, death – words which have been as conspicuous as the vocabulary of connection: proportion, wholeness, the light within. For all the championing of nontraditional family structures, and of differences over sameness, there are significant absences in the new familial grouping situated at the novel’s end. The crushed Leonard is all but forgotten and his wife goes unmentioned, Henry has collapsed, and his son Charles has been convicted of manslaughter. All the people the Schlegel sisters connected with in the course of the story are maimed, imprisoned or dead. Does the final sentence’s bumper ‘crop of hay’ really compensate for what has had to be scythed down on the way? Why is Anderson silent about the novel’s insistent pessimistic throb? After all, the major thesis of her book is that the liberal aesthetic is characterised by a ‘dialectic of scepticism and hope’. Why not claim the bleak diagnosis of Howards End as a sign of liberalism’s textured complexity, as she does of the 19th-century novels Bleak House, Middlemarch and The Way We Live Now?. Perhaps she recognises that the pessimism in Howards End is too devastating for her argument to contain. Forster’s bleakness derives not only from ‘an awareness of all those forces and conditions that threaten the realisation of liberal ambitions’, but from an awareness of the ultimate undesirability, and even danger, of those ambitions. The liberalism of the Schlegel sisters, however superficially appealing its talk of ‘connection’ and ‘tolerance’, in reality privileges the use of emotional, legal and even physical power to gain leverage over others. Insofar as Howards End endorses any point of view, it is Milbank and Pabdst’s claim that liberalism is founded on an ‘ontology of violence’. Anderson is therefore mistaken to celebrate liberalism’s bleakness. In fact, at the heart of Milbank and Pabdst’s searching critique of liberalism lies the argument that it is ‘a far too gloomy political philosophy’. Liberalism assumes that we are basically self-interested, fearful, greedy and egoistic creatures, unable to see beyond our own selfish needs and, therefore, prone to violent conflict. Even the Rousseauian inversion of Hobbes, which insists that the natural human individual, lost in contemplative delight at the surrounding world, is ‘good’, undermines its optimism with a pessimism about what happens when that individual enters society, becoming vicious from rivalry and comparison. Recourse to literature,

in this case at least, does not refute but justifies Milbank and Pabdst’s claim that liberalism in practice fulfils the worst assumptions of liberal philosophy. Are all novels as slippery as Forster’s? Do literary creations by their nature betray the politics they supposedly endorse? Or is it a special characteristic of liberal novels, liberal values being in some way antagonistic to literary values? Anderson’s book declares itself a continuation of some influential observations made nearly 70 years ago by American critic Lionel Trilling in his bestselling The Liberal Imagination (1950). The observations, for example, that ideology and character are inseparable, and that literature is uniquely capable of expressing the tragic dimensions of life. Yet, Trilling’s vision differs remarkably from Anderson’s in its conception of liberalism’s peculiar relationship with literature. Anderson is tellingly silent on this disjunction. Trilling, unlike Anderson, does not think there is a distinct ‘liberal aesthetic’. He observes that readers in liberal democratic cultures like his own most value writers who are actually antagonistic to their cultures’ social and political ideals (he offers, as examples, Yeats, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Lawrence and Gide). In fact, his argument is that these writers’ commitments to the aesthetic values of difficulty, ambiguity, complexity and open-endedness might be able to disrupt and ultimately correct the overweening rationalism and ‘organisational impulse’ of the liberal mind. Trilling’s project is thus an internal critique of liberalism that would ‘recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility’. The difference is between seeing literature as medicine for liberalism (Trilling) and as flag waver for liberalism (Anderson). For Trilling, liberalism and literature will never be friends – at best, only reluctant allies. Trilling is stuck in the middle of this unhappy marriage, which is why The Liberal Imagination in so many places reads like a guide for a self-hating liberal. Trilling reserves his greatest scorn for liberals untouched by this immobilising self-awareness, which perhaps accounts for his ambivalence towards Forster’s Margaret Schlegel. Margaret is of the same species as the overzealously moral type of liberal Trilling so eloquently rebukes in The Liberal Imagination. Trilling is intensely aware of the dangers posed by the ‘moral passions,’ which he says are ‘even more wilful and imperious and impatient than the selfseeking passion’. The progressive liberal who chooses, like Margaret, to act against social injustice ‘does not settle all moral problems

‘Islam is cancer’. According to Bannon, a global conflict on the scale of the Second World War against Islam is inevitable. Proponents and allies of the clash thesis, whether academics like Huntington or politicians such as Bannon, are fixated on proving that the single most important threat to Western civilisation is the Muslim community. But this has been disputed by historians and postcolonial critics, not least because it conflates Islam with the Arabian Peninsula, Wahhabism, and specific anti-Western trends in Muslim-majority countries. Moreover, it assumes that all Muslims are possessed by an irrational fear of the West, born of self-loathing for their lost status in global power. History is a creative enterprise. Piecing together a story of time and place is interpretive, yet the clash narrative is the lens through which our nation’s present-day priorities are justified. As a consequence of this, the clash worldview reaps what it sows, both politically and culturally. A ‘clash’ mentality leads the American government to react with hostility rather than diplomacy. And the same attitude forces immigrants and diaspora communities, who are not sufficiently ‘Western’, to pick between ‘civilisations’. Even if we happily straddle the lines between our ancestral backgrounds and newfound homelands, or hybridise our identities, the clash crusaders force us to choose. Or, as Trump’s vengeful rhetoric demonstrates, they choose for us. Despite the President’s insistence in 2016 that ‘Islam is the enemy’ and his call to bar Muslims from the country, he used softer language during his recent visit to Saudi Arabia. In Riyadh, where the President celebrated a $100-million arms deal with the country, he claimed to believe that the fight against terrorism is ‘not a battle between different faiths, different sects, or different

but on the contrary generates new ones of an especially difficult sort’. In Howards End Margaret’s moral tirade generates the problem of her husband’s despondence and subsequent nervous breakdown: Henry turns himself over to her ‘to do what she could with him’. Margaret dismisses him dryly: ‘He has worked very hard all his life, and noticed nothing. Those are the people who collapse when they do notice a thing’. Is there any love in that remark? Is hers a moral response to tragic difficulty? In The Liberal Imagination Trilling advocates a literary form – ‘moral realism’ – that will reflect an understanding of how blinding moral or ideological passions can be. Those in thrall to ideology – in particular liberal ideology, with its simplifying, abstracting impulse – are stumped by the difficulty and recalcitrance of tragedy. Perhaps the reason for which Trilling so valued Howards End is that it subtly exemplifies ‘moral realism’, because it encourages the reader to react to tragedy with more moral strenuousness than Margaret is able to. Indeed, Trilling’s own remarkable 1947 novel The Middle of the Journey, in many ways modelled on Howards End, repeatedly shows up the inability of liberal

civilizations. This is a battle between barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life, and decent people of all religions who seek to protect it.’ He went further, saying that Saudi Arabia and the United States share a common goal in ‘stamping out extremism’ around the world. The irony, of course, is that the administration is now supporting an Islamic regime that is itself guilty of mass violations of human rights, which are ostensibly the reason to be wary of Islam. Thus, we see another hypocrisy of the clash mentality: despite its isolationist rhetoric, its proponents are rarely able to withstand the necessity of alliance with other supposed ‘civilisations’. And to any observer of Trump’s presidency so far, clearly the softer rhetoric does not imply a true change of heart. In the same speech, Trump used the words ‘Islamic terror’, ‘Islamic extremism’ and ‘Islamist’ interchangeably, thereby lumping together distinct groups under the banner of religion rather than the areligious root causes of terrorism. His words also served to downplay the West’s role in generating terrorism, instead calling for Muslims to remake themselves in the image of the West’s religious and governmental system. The administration’s swift change of tone – and its duplicity – does, however, embody many aspects of my family’s MuslimAmerican experience. My mother and father, both practicing physicians in rural Missouri, are shown the upmost kindness and respect in their offices. In public, when recognized by their patients or colleagues, they are approached lovingly and treated as equals. Many of the small but growing number of Pakistani immigrants in Southwest Missouri are doctors or engineers. But what any Muslim living below the Mason-Dixon line can tell you is that underneath Southern hospitality is a thick layer of

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progressive ideologues to appreciate tragic complexity and respond morally to illness and death. The novel memorably shows us a man, recovering from a near-fatal illness, who realises that his devoted and courageous liberal friends see him and his experience as a threat: death is reactionary. We only have to tweak Trilling’s argument to come to the conclusion that reading literature, and in particular tragic literature, has the power to reveal what we know but do not acknowledge – that we are always already involved in relation with our fellow human beings in the sheer process of self-awareness, that the other is never distinct or separate but bound up with the self. If the much talked-about ‘crisis’ of liberalism is to become the ‘meta-crisis’ Milbank and Pabdst diagnose, we need to acknowledge our true nature as relational animals and reject deeply ingrained liberal habits of thought. Perhaps only literature can reach so far into the crypt, but it is neither flag-waver nor medicine for liberalism: it performs liberalism’s postmortem. 

distrust. When my parents step out of their offices at the end of a work-day and become anonymous Muslims praying at a newly built mosque, they become targets. Protestors’ signs outside of our mosque have read ‘Islam Hates Jesus’ or ‘Islam Hates America’. For my parents and Muslim friends, such accusations are puzzling. The Qur’an frequently mentions Jesus and affirms several of his miracles, including the virgin birth, and most Muslims in our community see themselves as sharing their story with Christians and Jews throughout the centuries. The question is whether clash crusaders can come to see this as well. 

[Untitled]

Christopher Eastwood alice's back. i watch her strip the dresses from her case and push wire hangers under each strap. the evening’s bruised as it only can in november. and i’m thinking of last summer when she stole an orange from the palette in the hallway and spat the pips into the lawn

We cannot speak the language that destroys the city we live in.

n a sequence from his 2009 poetry collection The Burning of the Books and Other Poems, George Szirtes retreats to childhood Budapest, memories shot through with sounds of shells and cries, and the terror of taking shelter during the failed uprising of 1956 against Communist rule. Szirtes senses words everywhere. ‘Out there a new language is being invented, / new aahs and ohs of grief ’. He arrived in England from his native Hungary as a refugee aged eight, and has remained here all his life. Many of the poems in this collection, not least the title sequence, are acutely aware of how language can be used to construct a personal identity, but also to divide and oppose concepts of identity. They pay attention to how individual experience will inevitably fall into a narrative that can often enlarged to make retrospective sense of events, as the speaker comments ‘only later will we grasp its still-raw / grammar and interpret the inchoate roar / of its history’. Sixty years on from the setting of this poem, a desire to impose narratives on cultural and national identity is rearing its head again in Hungary. In October 2016, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán ordered a referendum on new migrant quotas enforced by the European Union. Hoping to gain the support needed to reject the measure, his government ran a billboard campaign directed at the migrants themselves – with slogans such as ‘If you come to Hungary, you cannot take the jobs of Hungarians’ – written in Hungarian. A blatant use of language to isolate and alienate, they suggest a sealed cultural identity dangled in plain vision, marketed as painfully exclusive. The referendum billboard campaign is just one example of a Hungarian media world dominated by oligarchs close to Orban’s party Fidesz. A razor-wire fence constructed on the border with Serbia in 2015 still stands strong.

An untouchable language, and an identity forcibly defined in terms of opposites, terrorise Ferenc Karinthy’s 1970 dystopian novel, Metropole. Recently, a widespread revival of dystopian novels like Orwell’s 1984 has reflected the way we turn to stories to better understand and empathise with the events of our own time. In the case of those dystopias, we often know exactly what to expect. The careful construction of their internal worlds – their newspeak and doublethink – while acting as a touchstone of empathy, contrasts too with the necessary uncertainty of our on-going reality. Yet where a dystopian novel like 1984 may quite predictably invert our expectations,

Where Words Fail Ellie Duncan We use language to communicate, but what if it were to break down? In a Hungarian dystopia beset by revolution, language stops working and alienation follows. in Metropole the reference points feel almost impossible to decipher. The protagonist in Karinthy’s linguistic dystopia experiences the city as ‘an equation without known quantities’. First published in Hungarian in 1970, in 2008 George Szirtes translated it into English for the first time. It tells the story of Budai, a Hungarian linguist who is on his way to a conference in Helsinki, but somehow catches a wrong plane that brings him to a nameless, overpopulated city where absolutely nobody can understand him. Towards the end of the novel, the mob of people attempt a revolution that is swiftly crushed (perhaps reminiscent for contemporary readers of the 1956 uprising against Soviet rule) but whose purpose remains a mystery, as Budai wonders ‘what had happened? Was it a siege? A war? A revolution? Who fought whom and why?’ The narrative voice swarms with questions, questions on every page, every passing encounter raising countless more questions. Within this relatively short novel, Karinthy succeeds in building a suffocating and stagnant dystopia, a bleak move away from the power of language to build mutual understanding and empathy. Writing in the Guardian earlier this year, Szirtes suggested that ‘the government of Hungary has sought for six years to narrow the vista of imagination for its citizens by creating ‘patriotic’ national libraries, ‘patriotic’ art, to increase cohesion on its own terms… it seeks to define some pure cultural core that is Hungary and Hungary alone.’ Reading the novel nearly fifty years after its publication, its sealed, floating world, often read now as timeless allegory, may feel uncannily familiar too. As the days merge together and Budai incessantly wanders the streets, the eloquence of his recollections of home – canoeing on the Danube and noticing the movement of the ducks on the river – becomes increasingly consumed by the present. His attempts to maintain a sense of proportion, of relation to a life beyond the hellish metropolis, are constantly undermined. ‘Perhaps he would make a discovery that would startle the world and the time would come when, all things being equal, he might think himself fortunate to have found his way here, to have stumbled on it like an explorer. On the other hand

he might simply have been fooling himself.’ Trying to convince himself he is still on Planet Earth at all, Budai reminds himself that ‘there was an entirely recognisable way of life.’ Yet standing on the outside of this self-enclosed system, Karinthy delivers a depressing image of language as indecipherable, hiding secrets to happiness that can never be accessed. Moreover, any possibility of translation or cultural exchange is flatly denied. At one point, attempting to use his professional skills as a linguist to decipher the written language, we are told that ‘even now he was enjoying this instinctive mark making – it was almost a pleasure working on a logical problem that meant pitting his solitary wits against the city’s million and more secrets.’ Yet in this dementedly cyclical novel, every such attempt fails: in a world where language can only be accorded an objective, technical value, Budai’s individual identity becomes increasingly fragile. The atmosphere of isolation is exacerbated further by the refusal of the third person narrator to move beyond Budai’s psyche. The only person with whom Budai makes some kind of meaningful connection, a lift operator at his hotel, is kept at a taunting distance. The woman, Epepe – whose name is printed differently every time – is instead constructed out of Budai’s own narrative imaginings. Like Budai, the reader has virtually nothing by which to test his story’s truth. The power of language to shape our perceptions of other people – but also to deeply alienate us from others – works at the most extreme level of personal identity in Elif Batuman’s new novel The Idiot (2017), as Budai’s experience of being shut off from possibilities of cultural or personal identification is explored in the context of relationship between two people. Selin is an undergraduate in her first year at Harvard in 1995, who strikes up an email correspondence with Ivan, an older mathematics student. Selin is deeply aware of the shortcomings of language, yet constantly sees her life in terms of literary and narrative frameworks that inevitably disappoint her. Early on, she describes how ‘I believed that every story had a central meaning. You could get that meaning, or you could miss it completely.’ This is a philosophy that

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wreaks havoc as the novel progresses – though its ‘progression’ mostly revolves as a kind of suspended present, with little sense of plot in the traditional sense. Instead we are presented with a character constructing herself, spinning a narrative in real time, hopelessly blindsided by speculation as she devises a system of language only shared with Ivan. They communicate in coded, metaphorical discussions, through a shared economy of literary references like Pablo Neruda’s poem ‘Ode to an Atom’. Selin muses that ‘the things kept accumulating – the stars, the atoms, the pigs, and the cereal. It was decreasingly possible to imagine explaining it all to anyone.’ For every point of contact she thinks she makes with Ivan, there seems an absence or vanishing of meaning: ‘I felt dizzy from the sense of intimacy and remoteness. Everything he said came from so thoroughly outside myself.’ If the sacred language of Ivan and Selin feels beyond the reach of other characters that inhabit the novel’s (already quite insular) university setting, then this is an effect that diffuses outwards to the experience of the reader. Many elements of the novel – any hints at Ivan’s own perspective on the situation, for example, are simply inaccessible. The concrete plot points of the novel: Selin’s time at Harvard, her trip to Europe in the summer, and so on – exist in tension with the cyclicality of her hopes and aspirations, the narratives she is devising for herself in any given moment. Outside perspectives on their relationship are sporadic and fleeting, heightening a sense of suffocating subjectivity. At one point however, Selin’s best friend Svetlana summarises it bluntly: ‘for you language is a self-sufficient system, a game…now there’s this special language that can control everything, and manipulate everything, and if you’re the elite who speaks it – you can control everything.’ Selin’s eventual shock at realising the story of herself does not have one central meaning – that its meaning can be redefined on an anarchic whim, by someone ‘thoroughly outside myself ’ – perfectly captures a feeling of alienation from language, not unlike Budai’s sense of total expulsion from a world of indecipherable references. Preoccupied with life as it unfolds, Selin and others are rarely shown considering the practical reasons behind ways in which they interact. Yet, in a short but important fragment of the novel, on the phone to Svetlana, Selin suggests that ‘you and I can afford to pursue some narrative just because it’s interesting…But Fern has to work over the summer.’ Batuman admits a general self-centeredness and need for validation while implicitly acknowledging her characters’ economic and social privilege. She probes the dangers of creating a self in somebody else’s image, and of attaching total power to one

version of experience and identity – yet as it explores the pitfalls and gaps of understanding that inhere in subjective language, the novel remains a hilarious celebration of the vitality of narrative and language too. Patchy, imperfect, but essential narratives are at the heart of Szirtes’ collection The Burning of the Books and Other Poems. These are poems troubled by the way narrative can be used to impose upon and control historical and cultural identities, but that also view it as the solution. In ‘Consuming passion’, the painful physicality of language – ‘the word is angular and has sharp edges / that cut you’ – reminds us of the destruction it can wreak – ‘between abstraction and flesh/ there are oceans of blood’. In ‘Postscriptum’, the instantly recognisable and suggestive image of a bookburning is turned on its head. ‘We shall make them eat their words/ Cry the ringleaders, they shall speak with tongues of fire / They shall write on the page of the tongue, and we shall set wild cats/ on them’. In Szirtes’ poem, however, the menacing wild cats are blatantly

n 1966, a Motown singer of moderate success called Jimmy Ruffin first posed the question ‘what becomes of the broken hearted?’ And it was in that same year, according to Martin Amis, that humanity discovered sex. He differs here slightly from Philip Larkin, who in his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’ located the date we started ‘doing it’ properly around 1963, somewhere ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban / and the Beatles’ first LP,’ noting also that such a date ‘was rather late for me.’ Larkin’s focus on the intersection of sex and age would also be a hallmark of Amis’ discussion of the sexual revolution. But pedantry aside, Ruffin’s mellifluous enquiry gained a certain poignancy through the years of the sexual revolution, and afterwards, when there were many more broken hearts to be found. Amis’ recent novel, The Pregnant Widow (2010), is a semiautobiographical exploration of this period. Taken from the work of Alexander Herzen, the ‘pregnant widow’ is not so much a character, but rather a stage in revolutionary history. Poised between the death of the father (the fall of moralistic sexual discretion) and the birth of the child (the rise of second-wave feminism) it is the moment of greatest fragility. Amis takes a nuanced approach, exploring the differing effects of the sexual revolution on a range of characters, from the indomitable femme fatale Gloria Beautyman, to the protagonist Keith Nearing’s childlike sibling Violet, whose story ends in a tragic collision of booze and casual sex like Amis’ own younger sister Sally. This would explain the novel’s subtitle, ‘Inside History.’ The author takes an idealised period (the ‘she decade’, as he calls the 1970s in one of the novel’s intervals) and presents it through the lives of individuals, even his closest relatives like Sally. He admirably seizes on the British media obsession with the Amis family that was for so long used to berate his work (being regularly written off as the less talented offspring of Kingsley), and inverts it to create a thoughtful novel about the social upheavals of the late twentieth century. Another of Amis’ recent novels, however, takes a rather different approach to social analysis. In characteristic Amis fashion, Lionel Asbo (2012) picks its target: the caricature council estate lout of many a tabloid front page. The novel was thought-provoking in completely the wrong way, the caricaturist’s joke distinctly falling flat. In the most famous of his comic novels, Money (1984), Amis parodies the decadent excesses of wealth. Fair prey, I think, within the context of a decade when cash bought morality off. But what can really be gained from a crucifixion of England’s impoverished classes? W.H. Auden, in his essay ‘Reading’, remarked: ‘one sign a book has literary value is that it can be read in a number of different ways. Vice versa, the proof that pornography has no literary value is that, if one attempts to read it in any other

and wonderfully written – wonderfully unreal. ‘The small print of their teeth gathering in the margin / The index of their jaws containing everything possible to be written’. The poem exults in malleability of meaning, and the persistent potential for stories to be rewritten – a truth that always hovers in the air above Selin’s imaginings, even when her mistake is to believe in a single meaning. Importantly, however, Szirtes also warns of the importance of responsibility in writing and language, whether representing an individual or an entire group of people. With ‘Bathing and Singing’, he contrasts the foreboding weight of a historical narrative with the simple image of an old woman. In the last lines of the poem, ‘her interpreters eddy / about her. Her unseen/ commentators stand by, notebooks at the ready.’ It is a frank acceptance of our impulse to recreate others for ourselves, as a way of seeking meaning. The horror that this might never be possible is that which strikes Budai in Metropole: ‘in a particularly feverish moment it even occurred to him that each one

of them might be speaking his own language, and that there were as many languages as there were people.’ This dystopian, solipsistic image that we are somehow only ever speaking to our own thoughts is present in another of Szirtes’ poems, ‘The Translators’: ‘we carve/ images into clouds so we should not starve / for lack of company. We break / The silence into pieces, syllables of space. / We are translated into ourselves.’ Often, as in Metropole and The Idiot also, the poems in this collection imply a fundamental sadness around the limits of translation. Yet, as George Szirtes writes more than fifty years after learning English, ‘Philip Larkin thought a thing could not be both a window and a fenêtre at the same time. In fact it is neither. It is, as any Hungarian would tell you, an ablak. And between the three words for the same thing there is a kind of shimmering. It is the light shining through the window.’ In another of his poems, ‘Canzone: On Dancing’, Szirtes beautifully explores the responsibility we have for extracting meaning for ourselves

Something Amis Ethan Croft Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow scales the nuances of sex and ageing with wit and compassion – so why does Lionel Asbo fall so short in its parody of class and England? way than as a sexual stimulus… one is bored to tears.’ These words kept floating around my mind as I read Lionel Asbo, with its unpleasant depictions of the down and out: ‘Granny Grace was an early starter, and fell pregnant when she was just twelve.’ My suspicion that this kind of ‘comic writing’ could only appeal to a certain type of person was confirmed as I looked over the novel’s praise. Of particular note was the Mail on Sunday critic’s revelation that he ‘read the book in a sitting, chortling throughout.’ The titillation of the powerful at the expense of the weak seems to be the driving motivation of the novel. As in The Pregnant Widow, Lionel Asbo’s subtitle, ‘State of England’, is loaded with meaning. It cannot simply be read as the chronicle of one extraordinary thug who gets lucky off the back of a lottery ticket. Instead it should be considered with the author’s paranoia in mind, stemming from a preconception that Lionel Asbo and his like are indicative of working class life in twenty-first century England. Amis has proved time and again throughout his career that he is one of Britain’s most talented writers. The problem with Lionel Asbo lies not so much in the construction of the prose, which is impeccable as always, and in brief but all too infrequent sparks, illuminates even the most inane aspects of life lived in poverty. The novel really suffers because it has nothing to say. Even in attempting to approach the issue of poverty, his efforts stumble. Perhaps this is why The Pregnant Widow, with no workingclass characters of note, stands out as a better piece of fiction. When asked to name her favourite writer, Susan Sontag would always reply with Shakespeare, much to the chagrin of interviewers and dinner companions, who expected America’s greatest cultural critic to come up with something a tad more obscure. ‘I care passionately about many things that don’t get into my fiction and essays,’ she remarked in later life, ‘because what is in my head seems to me to lack originality – I never thought I had anything interesting to say about Shakespeare.’ The phrase ‘write what you know’ is one of the most overused and pernicious pieces of advice that can be given to an aspiring creative. Pure knowledge of a subject is not the key to good writing, and some of the most beloved fiction is derived from the escapism and extrapolation

of an author, be it the fantasies of Tolkien and Rowling which have created generations of voracious readers, or the dystopian worlds of Orwell and Atwood, which still inspire lifelong anti-totalitarian convictions. A certain factual grasp of the subject can of course aid coherent fiction, but greatness, as Sontag notes, comes out of originality. In Amis’ better novel The Pregnant Widow, the narrator’s identity (teased throughout but never confirmed) seems to be the protagonist Keith Nearing’s ‘superego’. This unconscious narration is original and innovative, presenting the temporal situation of the novel (misogyny, homophobia, and other forms of ignorant hatred all rife), but with the sensibilities and prejudices of the author forbidden from interference. Despite The Pregnant Widow being by far the more autobiographical of the two novels, I felt far less aware of author’s presence than in Lionel Asbo, where a sneering judgement cuts across narrative worth. Amis knows ‘how it’s done’, or at least how it should be done. The story of The Pregnant Widow is anchored in a consideration of the English novel: the protagonist Nearing is consuming all the Dickens, Eliot, and Shelley he can in the summer of 1970, before beginning a literature degree at Oxford. His affair with Glory Beautyman, one of the novel’s central events, is spurred on by a heated debate over Elizabeth Bennet’s motivations in Pride and Prejudice. In one instance, there is a perceptive riff on Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and her illustration of a poor man made wealthy, Heathcliff. The black villain of the moors, in all his complexity, is a far cry from Amis’ characterisation of Lionel (pronounced ‘Loyonoo’, apparently), a Frankenstein’s monster cooked up in a melting pot of tabloid news articles about ‘youth culture’, and heavyhanded pop culture references that could have been lifted directly from Wikipedia: ‘he resembled, some said, the England and Manchester United prodigy, striker Wayne Rooney.’ In The Pregnant Widow, our unconscious narrator describes a writer as the person sipping their drink in one corner of a party; watching, thinking, and formulating. When he emulates this philosophy, Martin Amis is at his very best. But in Lionel Asbo, he resembles the brash provocateur, at the centre of a social gathering, loudly opining on things he neither knows nor cares enough about.

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– for appreciating that language must always be measured with respect to its multiple other meanings. ‘So language too must dance / over a void between the figured cliffs / of meaning and nonsense, the rift between two cliffs / spanned by rope that trembles like a string / of the guitar when plucked…so we strike the string / and make music precisely by stopping string’. Language is one of our greatest sources of difference, and mutual empathy. Several poems in this collection, like ‘No sooner can a child’ and ‘White Noise’, present the intimidating impersonality of language, an obstacle to wrench meaning from in a lone fight. But by focusing on how individuals persist and survive, these three texts vividly remind us our dependence on language and how, used responsibly, it can be empowering – not in spite of what may be lost in translation, but because of it. 

It was really good fortune that saved my faith in Martin Amis. In an effort to catch up on his recent work, I had read Lionel Asbo with disappointment, afraid that one of my favourite authors had cast off on the path of irredeemable decline. But as luck would have it, I found a copy of The Pregnant Widow by chance at a book stall just off London Fields, and did the regular survey: cover, synopsis, praise. The friend who I was staying with did the same, and decided also to take a peek at the inside fold, where on most hardbacks you will find a portrait of the author. We laughed, not because of the image’s affectation, which is common. Rather, because something was so obviously missing. The right hand was poised upward – check. But instead of a cigarette nonchalantly hanging between the fingers, Amis seems to be clutching a marker pen. The subject of ageing is something he takes on with admirable selfdeprecation through the novel. Keith Nearing’s internal wrangling on whether to take up smoking again is littered with the justifications of youth: ‘yeah, non-smokers live seven years longer… It won’t be that convulsive, heartbursting spell between twenty-eight and thirtyfive. No. It’ll be that really cool bit between eighty-six and ninety-three.’ The crux of these remarks, and others, is Amis’ creeping realisation that it is hard to age with dignity. The old are caught out in moments of wishful thinking, hovering their hand to hold a cigarette when they packed in the habit years ago. His perceptive ruminations in The Pregnant Widow are the product of an author ageing, but not declining. Lionel Asbo, on the other hand, is Amis’ attempt to be resurrected as the writer of his younger days, crafting biting satire and despicable, but often sympathetic, characters. And yet it misses the mark by a long way. These two novels show us that originality is a far greater thing than cliché, and that thankfully, Martin Amis still has something to say. In the final pages of The Pregnant Widow, Nearing’s superego concludes ‘it’s the deaths of others that kill you in the end.’ Lionel Asbo was published shortly after the untimely passing of the author’s best friend Christopher Hitchens. It was also dedicated to him, although I am not sure that street-fighting Marxist of old would have taken kindly to the book’s sentiment. He was never uncritical of his lifelong confidant, lambasting Amis’ biography of Josef Stalin, Koba the Dread, in a review for The Atlantic. Just like The Pregnant Widow, Amis’ upcoming 2017 novel has been long in the making, with him reportedly starting work on it over a decade ago. Moving from a focus on ageing, to the logical endpoint (death), we can only hope that this new work will mirror the thoughtful contemplation of The Pregnant Widow, rather than the misguided posturing of Lionel Asbo. 

lagued by impotence and an irritating wife, in 1976 Kingsley Amis wrote ‘The Alteration’, a startling foray into fantasy fiction. Amis’ fantasy was that on the cusp of his break from the Church Martin Luther had been reconciled to the Vatican and elevated to the papacy. The Reformation never happened; the advance of modern secularism was halted. The events of the novel play out in a 20th century shaped by this new history – a Europe ruled over by the Roman Catholic curia. It’s a dark rewriting: amongst the recognisable historical figures populating Amis’s new 1970s are Monsignors Henricius and Laurentius, who head up the Holy Office (reimagined as the Church’s secret police). Behind this Latinised nomenclature it’s not difficult to make out the thinly veiled figures of Heinrich Himmler (of Gestapo infamy), and the the Russian Secret Police’s Lavrentiy Beria. Into this sequence fall Luther and other ‘heroes’ of the Reformation, recast as historical (Catholic) footnotes: Luther became ‘Pope Germanian I’, the instigator of reform of a different kind – far-reaching doctrinal misogyny. Thomas More succeeded him as pontiff, and secured England’s place within Christendom. Meanwhile, Thomas Cranmer led a band of exiled ‘renegades’ to found New England, and ‘Cranmeria’. The historical allusions are crass, but the book raises some important questions (aside from ‘What was Amis smoking that day?’). First, had the young Augustinian friar not nailed his theses to Wittenberg Cathedral’s door, would the Reformation even have happened, and second, why should that single action matter so much? For it is on Martin Luther that both Roper and Stanford have decided to focus, and their books are very different beasts. Roper’s has been ten years in the making (she has remarked that she only intended for the project to last at most five years), and the fact that it is out in time for the centenary seems nothing short of a happy accident. During its writing she has held a variety of academic posts (she is the first female Regius Professor of History at Oxford). Much like Luther and his writings her book came into being against a backdrop of years of academic debate (she convenes the Luther Special Subject for Oxford History undergraduates). Her conception of Luther is best understood in this academic context: in Oedipus and the Devil (1994), her seminal work on witchcraft and religion, she describes her modus operandi as being the pursuit of ‘individual subjectivities’ – instead of examining a personality in the

Making Luther Great Again? Benn Sheridan Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident Peter Stanford, Hodder & Staunton, 2017

Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet Lyndal Roper, Bodley Head, 2016

Five hundred years after Martin Luther nailed his Theses to a door, two new biographies seek to give a true likeness to someone who is more myth than man. Is this even worth it? context of a uniform 16th century mindset, she attempts to explain them within the frame of their personal narrative. Stanford is a journalist by trade and inclination – the kind of psychoanalytical historical approach Roper has pioneered holds very little appeal. His reasons for writing are nowhere near as abstract as ‘Luther’s inner development’. Instead, as journalists tend to do, he has chosen to focus his talents on something timely: his book is couched ‘in the particular setting of a 500th anniversary that will see Catholics and Lutherans edging closer than ever before to putting past disagreements behind them’. By all accounts, Luther was fairly prone to academic disagreements, but he was equally difficult to live with, suffering such violent bouts of Anfechtungen (depressive episodes coupled with migraines) that he could be bedridden for days. At his best, though, he could be garrulous, eloquent and fearsomely sharp. It is no surprise that his followers titled their collected rememberings of his conversations Tabletalk, for it was at the dinner table and amidst his family and friends (his house was always full of lodgers: even Karlstadt, the repentant radical of Luther’s reformation, moved in with wife and children in tow...and stayed for ten years) that Luther thrived. By then not a small man, the pater familias of the Reformation would regale visitors between courses with tales of his youthful exploits. Most biographers, including our two, are quick to point out that nowhere amongst these recollections, nor even in his voluminous correspondence, does the ‘Nailingsome-theses-to-a-church’ episode take place. The notion that 1517 was the most transformative moment in the Catholic Church’s second millennium therefore seems a little out of place. Yet, both Lyndal Roper and Peter Stanford stick by it, at least as far as

The Astronomer Mary Anne Clark After Vermeer Beautiful perfection of concentration – the globe turned flesh beneath the gentle hand – the mechanism of the eyes' dilation subsumed into a general yearning tilt towards the task, towards the single thing which all the strenuous acts of living serve – the unlit forgotten room recentering in the vocational window's yellow light.

publishing their books go. Both have bought into the wide array of ‘Luther kitsch’ which can now be purchased not only in Wittenberg (though it is Wittenberg and Wittenberg alone which houses a full 500 commemorative metrehigh plastic Luthers, perhaps marking the excess of the genre), but across Germany. Stanford’s personal encounter with Luther is guided by a Playmobil figurine – ‘the best selling Playmobil action figure in Germany’, he reminds us, somewhat portentously (though 34,000 sold in the first 72 hours is no mean feat). Like a kind of relic, it sits in his back pocket as he leads us on a whistle-stop tour of Luther’s greatest hits. Roper is more subtle. She has spent ten years sifting through Luther’s correspondence, which she has systematically collated and analysed. The image she creates is astonishingly detailed. Everything gets a thorough airing, from his musings as a troubled young student, to his anger and frustration at feeling (as he perceived it) sidelined at the formative, if unsuccessful, Diet of Augsburg, the final meeting with the Catholic princes. The German title of Roper’s work, ‘Der Mensch Martin Luther’ (The Man Martin Luther), matches this kind of biography: it is suitably – rightly – humanising. It is also far less provocative than her chosen title of ‘Renegade and Prophet’ – and she admits she tried desperately to get the German edition to match. In this context, her decision is a little peculiar: whilst professing to want to show us ‘the real Martin Luther’, she seems just as caught up in the ‘Luther myth’ as the next person. It would be difficult to argue, admittedly, that Luther was a bit-part player in the Reformation, but it is frustrating to see him heroised so blatantly. Amidst a whole panoply of reformers, this plain spoken monk from the mining district of Germany may have shouted the loudest, but he did not do it alone. To borrow from Diarmird MacCulloch, ‘western civilisation groans under the burden of Luther biographies’: writing about Luther is the academic equivalent of hagiography – the particulars of the narrative may change slightly, but no one doubts that it is a very worthy subject. A lot of this is to do with the sheer quantity of contemporary materials available about him: his collected works run into hundreds of thousands more words than those of his closest rival, Erasmus. Yet, it is to Erasmus and others of his ilk that Luther is indebted. This ilk was humanism: the intellectual movement de jour which rejected the traditional approach to religious thinking, scholasticism, in favour of something much more pared back. Erasmus called it ad fontes, or back ‘to the source’. Humanism encouraged a return to scriptures in their original language, supplemented by the array of classical works which would help inform how those scriptures ought to be interpreted. In 1500 Erasmus had published The Adages, a work which quickly rose to the top of the Early Modern equivalent of Amazon’s bestsellers list. He took classical idioms, and used them to explore what it meant to be a Christian. In one, he writes:

[This is] the difference between the follower of the world and the follower of Christ: the first admires and chases after the worthless things which strike the eye at once, while the second strives only for the things which are least obvious at a glance, and furthest from the physical world – and the rest he passes over altogether, or holds them lightly, judging everything by its inner value.

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We know that Luther was very familiar with Erasmus’ works, and even if their correspondence didn’t show it (it does), it is easy to see just how marked an influence Erasmian ideas were for the young Augustinian Friar. The parallels between Erasmus’ rejection of ‘worthless things which strike the eye at once’, and Luther’s fierce critique of indulgences – the act that got him noticed in the first place – are abundant. Like Luther, Erasmus loathed the late medieval Church’s excess. Unlike Luther, Erasmus never made the leap to full blown heresy, but Luther was by no means the first to do so. A century or so before Luther’s own small act of defiance, another ‘renegade’, Jan Hus, a Bohemian and, like Luther, an academic (at the Charles University in Prague) was executed in 1415 for defying the Church’s teaching on Communion in both kinds. Heresy was not a rare occurrence – it’s worth remembering that the same Holy Office Amis reimagines so ruthlessly was established (as the Inquisition) in Spain as early as 1478. So, before Martin Luther is singled out, as he is by both authors here, it’s worth remembering that he did not stand alone against the Church. Giving credit where credit is due, both Stanford and Roper take pains to document those precise moments where the Reformation was removed from Luther’s control – but these are only moments, and, these being biographies, the scope of the Reformation as a European-wide movement is necessarily blinkered. I’d like to challenge the historical value of biographies like this at all: I can accept Roper’s motivation – for Luther is unsurpassed in complexity of character – but hearing Stanford wax lyrical about Luther’s relevance to the modern Catholic is a little grating. He points to changes within the Church over the ‘Doctrine of Justification’, such as the 1999 joint declaration by the Catholic and Lutheran churches: coming into the 21st century, church leaders seemed say that the minute differences between Lutheranism and Catholicism were less important than just trusting in Christ. This is helpful, and Stanford tells us far more about what Luther believed than Roper does (as far as the nitty gritty of Lutheran belief is concerned), but it is unhelpful – and profoundly unhistorical – to build him up as the sole bulwark against a self-serving and un-Christian church. Just as many if not more movements to reform came from within. The most neglected character in both biographies is Luther’s wife, Katharine ‘Katie’ von Bora, escaped nun and mistress of the Luthers' household. When Luther was bedbound by crippling migraines, she would nurse him, manage the many houseguests, and look after their children (none of whom, incidentally, followed their father into the ‘reforming’ profession. The sons became each a lawyer, a theologian, and a physician. The daughter married a minor nobleman). When Luther died, Katie was left to manage the household, too, and faced a world where Luther’s battle was in no way clearly won. Her death, in 1552, is remarkable for its lack of fanfare: she was penniless, had been booted out of the palatial ex-monastery Luther family home, and had seen the great leaders of Luther’s reformation defeated in battle (in 1547 at the Battle of Mühlberg). What lived on, and what sustains the 70 million Lutherans in Germany, Scandinavia and America today, is not Lutheran faith as Luther would have liked – one guided by his interpretation of scripture – but a Church sustained by the power of its message. This message is found as much in Jan Hus, in Erasmus, and even the Bishops at Vatican II, as it is in poor Martin: the ‘inner value’ of the laity, a priesthood of all believers which places Luther on the same footing as everyone else. And yes, Luther said it well, and said it loudly, but given that everyone else was saying it too, he doesn’t really seem that remarkable at all. 

between big tourist buses and wayward reptiles that have strayed onto the tarmac. But there is a larger confrontation taking place, one that concerns the future of the Galápagos. Tourism is big money, and Ecuadorians have been moving here in large numbers to make the most of it. Economic growth may have slowed since the early 2000s thanks to more stringent migration controls, but the pressure is still immense. In turn, invasive species are increasingly difficult to police with so much organic material now imported from the mainland, and a haphazard approach to town planning has exacerbated the effect of human activity on Santa Cruz. The Darwin Research Centre is only a few minutes from the port, but it can feel very far away indeed. Journalist and author Henry Nicholls outlined the problem in 2014: ‘the Galápagos is a perfect case in point – that if conservationists fail to consider the needs of humans they ignore a vital part of the ecology.’

The Galápagos A Diary by Toby Clyde A Landscape of Indifference

he landscape of the Galápagos archipelago has never much cared for first impressions. ‘Nothing can be imagined more rough and horrid than the surface of the more modern streams,’ Darwin remarks in his Journal of Researches (1839) as he recounts, with more than a little trepidation, his initial landing on San Cristobel: ‘A broken field of black basaltic lava is everywhere covered by stunted brushwood,’ whose black cones and chimneys, ‘strongly reminded me of those parts of Staffordshire where the great iron-foundries are most numerous.’ It is a fortuitous comparison: centuries earlier, the fourth Bishop of Panama’s accidental encounter with the Galápagos in 1535 led him to describe the rocky terrain and thin topsoil as, ‘like slag, worthless.’ The Bishop and his crew nearly died before they found fresh water – it would have taken little imagination to feel that they had been cast into a hell on earth. Nowadays, the reputation of these islands is nearly paradisiacal. Last December, I flew to the Galápagos and joined the more than 1.5 million tourists who have been and gone since the islands opened to visitors some 50 years ago. These volcanic specks in the Pacific have become an environmental spectacle, a byword for untouched natural beauty that now embodies the very concept of evolution. The young gentleman geologist who stumbled ashore in 1835 would have found it all very bemusing. In fact, the famous association between Darwin and these isles has little to do with the man himself. It was researcher William Beebe’s 1924 book, Galápagos: World’s End, that helped popularise the link. This reputation often feels like a testament to how much we, not the Galápagos, have changed. Arriving by plane into Baltra Island, the north-facing slopes of its larger neighbour, Santa Cruz, rise up nearby: huge and arid, they are as inhospitably beautiful as they have ever been. For the very reasons that repulsed early colonisers the Galápagos is now a marvel – a specially preserved meeting place of volcanic rock and natural selection. Perhaps even more remarkable is the continued survival of these fragile habitats even now. As far as we know, only 17 per cent of the 4,000 native species have become extinct, with 97 per cent of the islands now a protected nature reserve. Despite decades of conservation challenges, despite the dismissive greed of policymakers, despite the fragility of the climate we live in, the Galápagos endures. On the evening of my arrival, our boat took us to North Seymour, the even smaller sibling island of Balra. A little slip of rock, it is home to an almost comically large number of birds, balanced on whatever will hold their weight. Upon landing, we were emphatically told to stay at a minimum of three metres from the inhabitants. At first it seemed unnecessary – there are few non-extinct species that haven’t learnt to keep out of arm’s reach. Yet this is a peculiar form of narcissism, for the animals of the Galápagos simply don’t care. Why should they? As Darwin observed shortly after his arrival: ‘The natural history of this archipelago is very remarkable: it seems to be a little world within itself.’ Largely devoid of natural predators on land and protected from touchy-feely visitors by guides, the fauna has little reason to pay us any attention. This indifference struck Beebe nearly a century ago as he wrote: ‘once we were taught that the earth was the centre of the universe, then that man was the raison d’être of earthly evolution. Now I was

thankful to realize that I was here at all, and that I had the great honor of being one with all about me, and in however a small way to have at least an understanding part.’ This is a rare insight – although it is worth noting that Beebe, like Darwin, had a tendency to test the tameness of the island animals by seeing how far he could throw various land iguanas. Yet, theirs was certainly not an understanding of the natural world shared by earlier visitors. A century of whalers and fishermen took advantage of the apparent tameness to eat around 200,000 giant tortoises, and decimate the populations of many other species. The islands were named after these reptilian inhabitants. ‘Galápagos’ meaning tortoise in Spanish, but less, it seems, as an observation, and more as a culinary invitation. Perhaps it is foolish to hope that we can entirely escape the arbitrary self-importance that characterises our relationship with nature, no matter how well intentioned. It is salient to remember that the voyage of HMS Beagle was not primarily a scientific expedition. The ship was an Admiralty vessel, performing imperial charting of the South American coastline. Like every other tourist there, I too have dutifully produced the necessary fodder for social media, standing moronically in front of an unsuspecting sea lion for a group photo. Even the history of Galápagos conservation is marked by a conformity to human anniversary: a special law was passed to designate it a national park to mark the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. Ecuador’s formal acquisition of the archipelago on the 12th February 1832 even happens to coincide with his birthday. This occasionally feels like a kind of absurd posturing in the face of millions of years of tectonic and evolutionary development. The effect is not lost on Kurt Vonnegut, whose acerbic novel Galápagos (1985), abounds in human selfishness and meaningless coincidence. His narrator, looking back from a distant future where humans have evolved into seals, comments ‘a million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That’s all I can say.’ Vonnegut would have been just as cutting if he were around to comment on the return of perhaps the most famous resident of these isles, Lonesome George, who was shipped back to the Charles Darwin Research Centre in March. It was a bittersweet reunion. George died of natural causes in June 2012, the last individual of the Pinta Island tortoise species. His doomed isolation for 40 years at the station cast him as a symbol of environmental destruction, and in the process galvanized a huge conservation effort to restore tortoise populations to historic levels. His embalmed body now stands on display, like some long forgotten antediluvian beast. Yet, the desire not to forget is strong. At the grand opening ceremony of his exhibit the theme was: ‘a legend, a hope, a future,’ a reflection of the immense, and sometimes contradictory, significance that accompanies the events of these islands. It can be hard to fully comprehend: a place so beautifully untouched yet so often threatened, where conservation has struggled and succeeded. There is even a hope of sorts for George – though it comes a little late for comfort – as recent genetic testing has revealed that mixed tortoise breeds on nearby islands are close relatives, and they could be used to engineer a de-extinction of his species. Near the end of my trip, I stayed a few nights on Santa Cruz, passing through busy Puerto Isidro Ayora, where the majority of the 30,000 Galápagos residents work, on my way to the highlands above. These areas have the kind of lush greenery that usually carpets tropical areas, fed as they are by a cool southerly wind and, in the hot season, rain. Consequently, most of the landmass not designated national park is concentrated here, along with large populations of domed giant tortoises. This occasionally makes for strange standoffs

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The relationship between humans and nature encompasses a problem bigger than the Galápagos, and yet, as always, it is uniquely confronted by it. In Santa Cruz one of our guides, Roberto Plaza, took us to a final destination, high up in giant-tortoise territory. He and his wife Reyna, an experienced conservationist, have spent five and a half years designing and building the first completely eco-efficient buildings in the Galápagos. Compact, angular and otherworldly, the project, named MonteMar, is a startlingly beautiful departure from the houses back in town. It also doubles up as their home and as accommodation they rent out to tourists. MonteMar’s difference to the town is not just in appearance, but also design: built largely with local materials, the complex is almost entirely self-sufficient in water and energy usage. ‘It was born out of frustration really, how things are running in the human component’, Reyna said. ‘In the 3 per cent (land not designated national park) we are really doing business as usual, as if we were living in any other part of the world. MonteMar is a pilot project to prove that we as human beings can live in harmony with nature and that we can give back as much as we receive.’ It can be hard to wrap your head around just how impressive their achievement is. Although both Roberta and Reyna have degrees related to conservation, and the latter an M.B.A from INCAE Costa Rica, it took four years alone to develop the concept. With the help of an architect from the mainland they learnt how to properly treat bamboo so it wouldn’t rot, design natural ventilation systems, and collect enough water to support a small family. That is to say nothing of the headache that inevitably accompanies sourcing materials and builders in somewhere like the Galápagos. Then there was the greater challenge: to convince others that all this time and effort was worthwhile. As Reyna described it, ‘we have a tendency to do what we have done before – people are afraid of changing. It takes a lot of energy to go against people’s beliefs.’ Despite its arresting presence, it would be easy to mistake the mottled lava walls of MonteMar for something far more primal. As a visitor, it’s hard not to be enthralled, to seek some grander significance. Even Darwin cannot resist straying into a poetic register: ‘these huge reptiles, surrounded by the black lava, the leafless shrubs, and large cacti, appeared to my fancy like some antediluvian animals.' Whether as a hell, paradise, or feeding ground the international significance of the Galápagos Islands matters. At the close of my conversation with Reyna, she summarised the intent behind so many years of work and research: ‘We feel the lack of power as individuals but understand the weight of the group. If there is a place with all the right conditions for this it is the Galápagos. It is a laboratory of social and economic issues for the world.’ 

‘H

e’s witty, he’s experienced, he’s got tales to tell, he’s full of himself, but there’s an edge to him, there’s something about him…’ This is how Sir Derek Jacobi characterises Oscar Wilde, but it’s a perfect self-description. Jacobi is telling me a story to justify Kenneth Branagh’s decision to cast him as the young hothead Mercutio at 77. A young George Orwell walks into a bar with some friends, and they hit it off with a witty older gentleman who tells marvellous stories. Only on his departure do they discover that the older man is Oscar Wilde. ‘That resonated’, Jacobi says. ‘The older man joined the younger men, with no particular sexual connotation, but they enjoyed his company. That gave me a grounding. That gave me a justification for casting me.’

There’s certainly something special about Derek Jacobi, but he’s keen to dress down his otherworldliness. He tells me he’s spent the last four days recording a Doctor Who audiobook. ‘It’s a great franchise, Doctor Who,’ he says. ‘Nowadays, the otherness of people who act has diminished – if not disappeared – because people can watch the telly as an ordinary bloke and think, “I could do that!” I watch Coronation Street. Somehow, acting, in that sense, is not special.’ He acknowledges his reputation as ‘classical, costume, posh’, and rightly insists he’s none of these things. But there remains something ‘other’, something bohemian about him. Calling himself ‘a jobbing actor’ and ‘the luckiest actor you will ever speak to’ doesn’t explain it away. Jacobi is similarly unfussy about the ‘duty’ of the National Theatre, given that he’s a founding member. He dismisses as nonsense the claims that this season has neglected ‘classic’ plays (apart from Shakespeare): any theatre’s duty is only ‘to entertain’, he asserts. ‘And to guide, to teach. To provoke, of course. To make the audience think a bit differently, or just think about something they’ve never thought of before. It gets the juices flowing inside the head, and inside the heart.’ He is unafraid to criticise inaccessibility, even in Shakespearean greats like Sir John Gielgud, an actor very much of his era. ‘The voice is very

We Are All Prince Hamlet Katie Mennis Derek Jacobi is an award-winning actor and director, who says he never goes to the theatre anymore. He talks to the ORB about conspiracy theories, student acting and making Shakespeare straightforward. poetic, very musical. But it is limited, in that when you hear Gielgud say a line, you know almost how he’s going to say the next one, because there was a pattern to his technique. I know this a criticism of God, but the delivery of some of the Shakespeare is not terribly meaningful, not very character-led. I always

found it a little alienating. Too concerned with the metre, the verse, the rhythm, rather than spoken thought. Even Shakespeare must sound like spoken thought.’ On Laurence Olivier, he combines the reverence felt for a mentor with the healthy disrespect due to a friend: ‘He was God. He was wonderful. Could be a bugger. I mean, he could be a nasty old bat. He had many hats.’ Sometimes he lets his determinedly frank ‘jobbing actor’ persona slip into a more rhapsodic mood. He recalls the opening of the National Theatre on the 22nd of October, 1963, with Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet, directed by Laurence Olivier. ‘I was playing Laertes, and it was my 25th birthday. After the first night, there was a big party in the auditorium and on the stage, and all the glitterati of that time were there, and I was boring the ass off everybody going, “it’s the most wonderful night of my life. Laertes to O’Toole’s Hamlet! My twentyfifth birthday, my twenty-fifth birthday!” Eventually, silence was called for, and Shirley Bassey sang “Happy Birthday” to me. I shall never forget that. That was the first night of the National Theatre, in ’63.’ There’s an edge to Jacobi that fights for no-frills accessibility, but I often sense nostalgia for the otherness of the glitterati of that time. Tom Stoppard is an exception to his rule of straightforwardness. ‘Stoppard’s like

Shakespeare – the revelling in words, the playing with words. The words are the star of the show, really, rather than the actors. With Shakespeare, of course, I bang on about accessibility, but, with Stoppard, it’s like water tinkling in a fountain – you get a cupful and then you miss the next. That in itself is a theatrical experience, which is wonderful.’ Characteristically, Jacobi throws in a starry anecdote: ‘I only ever once did a short Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound. I remember, Tom came to one of the rehearsals, and I said to him, “I’m not exactly sure what this bit means”, and he said, “No, nor am I, nor am I. Only God knows, now”, which was very sweet, very honest.’ Jacobi thinks that playing the great Shakespearean roles is about reacting to a situation, rather than constructing a character, which allows him to bring a lot of himself to his roles: ‘I tried not to become Lear, but to make Lear me. I always get a bit uptight about actors who say, “I can’t do that. My character wouldn’t do that.” Your character could possibly do anything. We all act out of character a lot of the time. That’s what makes the human being and the human condition so fascinating. Situation is more important than character. Situation. Leave all options open! Don’t say, “I can’t go there” – because you would. In a certain situation, you would.’ I suggest that this method must work particularly well for Hamlet, the great personality role whom he has played nearly 400 times. Though Hamlet is widely considered to be a character with great interiority, a speech like ‘To be or not to be…’ is in fact remarkably impersonal, with hardly any personal pronouns. Is it, then, all about situation? For Jacobi, it is. ‘Whoever’s playing Hamlet – man, woman, fat, thin, tall, short, white, black – you put the personality of the actor, the sound of the actor, what the actor gives off, the charisma, into Hamlet’s situations. Hamlet is everybody that plays him.’ To demonstrate the power of situation, Jacobi begins playing Lear from his sofa, and I get a private glimpse of what it must be like to see him on stage. He thinks the first scene of Lear is incredibly difficult, but has a firm view on how things start to go wrong. He asks me rhetorically whether Lear intends to divide his kingdom when he comes on stage. ‘For me’, he says, ‘the first line of the play, and Lear’s first line, give it away.’ The first line is ‘I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.’ Lear’s first

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is ‘Attend the lords of France and Burgundy’. Jacobi believes that Lear comes on to talk about Cordelia’s marriage, but becomes flustered when her suitors are not here. So he talks about his ‘darker purpose’ in the meantime, and it’s a shock to all that he’s dividing the kingdom three ways. ‘That made sense to me, that he comes on and things go wrong. And things are improvised, and it’s not what he meant. It’s not what he meant; it’s not what he planned. And already he’s discombobulated. That’s it.’ When he emerges from inhabiting Lear, I try to ask about his unusual views on Shakespeare authorship. Jacobi and Mark Rylance have made a Declaration of Reasonable Doubt that Shakespeare’s plays were written by the man we recognise from Stratford, and Jacobi has subscribed to the Oxfordian theory, that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author. He doesn’t seem keen to broach the subject, but soon gets riled up. ‘I do think it matters,’ he says. ‘I think we’re being led down a path to myth and legend, but myth and legend are very difficult if not impossible to dislodge without very concrete, indisputable evidence.’ I wonder what he thinks of The New Oxford Shakespeare, and its hypotheses that Shakespeare’s plays involved more collaboration than previously thought. He is open to this idea, if in an unorthodox way: ‘This is where Oxford becomes important, because he was a known literary patron and he had a kind of salon, and two of his secretaries were playwrights. To me, it smacks of a salon, of a group of literary, likeminded people, pooling knowledge with one man in particular in control of it all.’ As I begin to wonder whether the idea of a salon smacks of snobbery, he preempts my concerns: ‘The one thing they say is that if you do question authorship, you are anti-Shakespearean. I mean, my career! How can you say that Mark Rylance and I are antiShakespearean? We are anti-Stratfordian – yeah, guilty. But we’re not anti-Shakespearean. It’s really scraping the barrel, to say we’re snobs.’ I move away from the subject, to ask about his time acting as a student. ‘Theatre was the reason I went to Cambridge,’ he recalls fondly. ‘It was not to do History. I knew I wanted to be an actor. I also knew that Oxford or Cambridge, if you could get there, were hotbeds of acting. And they both had a veneer of professionalism about them. You could spend your three terms a year acting, which I did.’ I suspect this idyllic thespian lifestyle may not be possible to the same extent at Oxbridge today. Jacobi has strong advice for the budding student actor. ‘If you want to be an actor, don’t’, he urges. ‘If you need to be an actor, do. It’s vocational. If you can live without being an actor, don’t be an actor. Wanting is not enough. Needing is all.’ 