A good interview in the Guardian today with Dan Rhodes, the author of Anthropology, Don’t Tell Me the Truth About Love and now Timoleon Vieta Come Home. He famously claimed he would give up writing following the publication of his third book because the whole process made him so miserable. Here he says: “When [writing] is going well, it’s the best thing in the world”, but adds, “That probably happens about 5% of the time.” Glad to hear I’m not alone.
So the defendants of the Who Wants A Million Coughs trial have finally been found guilty. When it first opened, the case seemed to me a spurious PR stunt, especially when it was reported that a total of 192 coughs were heard throughout the show in question, of which only a dozen or so were supposed to have guided said military personnel to the correct answers. But as we know, mistakes are always made in wars, and now the case is closed, transcriptions of crucial bits of the show are emerging which help explain the jury’s decision, with the improbably-named “quiz anorak” Tecwen Whittock spluttering once for “yes” and twice for “no” at judicious junctures like some bizarre game-show séance. Sounds like they all deserve each other.
Went to see The Pianist at the Richmond Filmhouse. An astonishing, distressing, moving, noble and humane film, despite its story of inhumanity. It was the harder to watch in the knowledge that a real war, albeit not a comparable one either in scale or humanity, was being fought by your own country as it was being screened. The transformation that Adrien Brody undergoes throughout is remarkable – he starts out in his mid-20s and by the end when he’s hobbling around the bombed-out houses and hospital he looks about 100. By the end, you really got the feeling you’d lived through the war with him. Some truly dreadful things are depicted in the first 45 minutes in occupied Warsaw and I didn’t think I could continue watching because I knew things could only get immeasurably worse when the family were taken to the concentration camp, but the whole film took a totally unexpected turn when Szpilman managed to avoid the cattle-truck. When that train pulled away I got the feeling that Roman Polanski was saying, “Beyond this point, I cannot go, and nor, truly, can anyone else. Let the ghosts of those tormented souls – both the Jews and the Nazis – rest now.” The film was, in fact, the least Polanskiesque of all his films; it made me think that – with the exception of the masterpiece Chinatown – he’s just been dicking about for the rest of his career.
What interested me about my own reaction to the film was that the brutality depicted just made me feel sick and numb, whereas it was only the performance of the Chopin piece in the bombed-out house that made me cry. That piece, both as a composition and a performance, contained everything – love, hate, pride, humanity, sorrow, faith, hope, despair, life, death, war, peace… It struck me that in this sense, the story could only have been about a musician: at the crucial juncture, when his life is finally on the line once and for all, if he’d been some other kind of artist instead, say a painter, writer or actor, I think the outcome would have been different, because those media wouldn’t have been immediate enough for him to express himself. Douglas Adams once said, “Music is the most abstract of all the arts – it can only be itself”; but in the way it was used in this film, music seemed vindicated as the least abstract, the most direct channel of communication between – in that famous phrase, so popular at the moment – hearts and minds.
The Guardian reports that lone British oarsman Andrew Halsey was taken aboard a fishing boat near the Galapagos islands yesterday after a 4,117-mile journey, setting a world record for the smallest distance travelled in the most time at sea in a rowing boat. But the Ocean Rowing Society appears to have disowned Halsey – because he’s epileptic. Halsey’s odyssey was surely the more heroic for this fact, but Kenneth Crutchlow of the ORS is quoted: “It’s a heck of a long distance for an epileptic to row. The question now is why.” Well, presumably for the same reasons anybody would have considered undertaking the challenge. Would the ORS have asked this “question” if Halsey hadn’t had this disability? And was the oarsman really a danger to anybody but himself, at worst?
Meanwhile, in a review of Walking the Shadows by Donald James in the Guardian Review, Mark Lawson writes: “James’s central device… was memorably used in Reginald Hill’s masterful novel On Beulah Height (1998). It’s unlikely that James knew this but, for the reader who does, his story starts at a disadvantage… Already, in the opening chapter, there are three technical problems… The book’s main action happens in 1985 for no compelling fictional reason… With crime fiction increasingly the province of high stylists, James relies too often on basic emotions recounted in simple prose… Much of the dialogue sounds as if has been badly translated from French…” Before I read this review I had never heard of Donald James, although Lawson explains that he is known for at least three books and is a prominent historian of Russia. Now, although I have always had my doubts about criticism of all kinds, and have not been able to make up my own mind about the qualities or otherwise of this novel, this review did make me wonder how the book had been published at all given its apparently comprehensive roster of weaknesses. Reading it both uplifted and depressed me in about equal proportions: if books with such faults are getting published, even if more so on the basis of a back catalogue than on their own merits, it makes the challenge of actually getting published seem a lot less interesting; but by the same token, it makes me less anxious about the drawbacks of my own efforts… all of which is counterproductive.
In the past few days The Guardian has published some excellent poems about the war by Tony Harrison and the UK Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.