Eve's Alexandria

The TBR resolution, Week 13

I've been having a little reading slump recently.  This hasn't manifested itself as a lack of reading - I've been ploughing onwards regardless - but as a lack of interest in whatever comes to hand.  I've not had a great deal of success with Philip Hoare's Leviathan, despite loving the first 20 pages, and I've been sleep-walking through A Dry White Season by Andre Brink, utterly failing to appreciate what an interesting novel it actually is.  In desperation I've been grazing my shelves, plucking books out, reading half a dozen pages, and then listlessly discarding them around the house like a trail of bookcrumbs.  It's a dangerous mood to be in when you're under a book-buying edict.  The desire to find something to read is very strong but I'm so stupidly uninspired that my TBR seems barren, all 450 books of it.  A lapse was inevitable.

Before I knew it I was browsing in Little Apple Bookshop in my lunch break yesterday and - shock, horror! - buying two books on impulse.*  The books in question? Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill and New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani (trans. by Judith Landry).  The irony of breaking my TBR resolution by buying a book about Susan Hill's TBR resolution added to the pleasure of the purchase.  The Marani has been on my radar for months, after Nicholas Lezard's high praise in the Guardian, and buying a small press word-of-mouth success from an independent bookshop felt as much like a good deed as an indulgence. 

I should have known that I wouldn't be able to stop at two.  Foolish, foolish book-buying addict that I am.  I was in the library in the afternoon for work, and would you believe they were having a book sale?  Paperbacks a £1.  I was in there like a flash, dizzy with lust.  Three more books into my bag:  The Gift by Vladamir Nabokov and From A Crooked Rib by Nuruddin Farah, both Penguin Modern Classics, and Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker.   I know the latter is a big favourite in some parts of the blogosphere (particularly with Simon), and it sounded so light-hearted that I couldn't resist.  The Nabokov I bought because a) it's £10.99 new, and £1 is bargain! and b) more importantly, after Jenny's review of Pnin I've been wanting to read beyond Lolita.   And From a Crooked Rib hooked me in with the blurb - a young Somali woman tries to make her own destiny - and the happy surprise I felt when I realised it was written by a man and published in 1970.  As the introduction points out, that's a rare bird in African fiction.

After this lovely book buying I felt refreshed and a little bit guilty, only to arrive home later to a parcel from Sort of Books, with a copy of Kathleen Jamie's new collection of nature writing Sightlines inside.   I cracked it open, read half a dozen pages and then, for the first time in a week, kept on reading. And on, and on.  Jamie has lifted the slump right off me.  What a wonderful writer she is, whether the subject is Artic tourism or gannet colonies or the special February light that heralds spring.  I can't get  enough of her reflective, poetic style; poetic but still muscular and toned, not whimsical at all. 

Look how long this post has got now!  I was going to write about book podcasts and book magazines too, but I should probably leave it for another day.  I'm off now to 'The Hvalsalen' with Kathleen Jamie - I've no idea what or where that is, but from the first paragraph it looks like Norway will be our destination.  I'll leave you with a little extract from Sightlines about the quality of silence in the Fjords:

Behind the ship, the far side of the bay rises to a low brown ridge similar to this, and beyond that ridge is arranged a row of white pinnacles - the tips of iceburgs grounded in a hidden inlet.  Westward rises a range of brown jagged mountains, and beyond the coastal range there are hints and gleams of something I thought at first was a band of cloud, but it's ice, maybe the edge of the inland icecap.  The air is extraordinarily clear.

That's what we see.  What we listen to, thought is silence.  Slowly we enter the most extraordinary silence, a radiant silence.  It radiates from the mountains, and the ice and the sky, a mineral silence which presses powerfully on our bodies, coming from very far off.  It's deep and quite frightening, and makes my mind seem clamorous as a goose.  I want to quell my mind, but I think it would take years... I know only that I'd never heard anything like it, a silence that could dismiss a sound, as wind would dismiss a feather.

~~Victoria~~

*In my defence I'd also had a Very Bad Day.  An important funding bid had gone AWOL in the post, meaning that we missed the submission deadline.  Given all the work and effort that went into it, and the things riding on it, I wanted to run straight home for a good cry.  I bought the books to comfort myself, which is better than getting blind drunk or taking hard drugs, and went back to work instead.

Quarry Awaiting a Hunter

Absolution by Patrick Flanery is one of this year's Waterstones 11, and my first new release read of 2012.  I've managed to last three months reading from the TBR alone, but when Flanery's debut popped through my door on the same day that I finished Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country it felt like a sign.  From a classic of apartheid fiction to a freshly printed look at South Africa post-apartheid (although written in this case by an American from Nebraska).  The transition from one to the other was slightly bumpy.  Whereas Paton is a lyrical writer, of landscape and raw emotion, Flanery is distinctly formal, his approach very literary and his tone a little chilly.  It was as though the South African sun had just gone down on me and left me in a shivery twilight.  This is not a problem, just a shock. I should put it another way: Cry, the Beloved Country is a book that made me feel, Absolution is a book that made me think.

It is one of those literary puzzles: spot the symbolism, follow through the thematic thread, watch out for mirroring and parallels, count the number of inter-textual references, guess the theoretical approach.  Flanery plays with four voices - from first person, to the third person, to a rather sticky and disconcerting second person - and pace.  It goes without saying that none of his narrators can be trusted.  Sometimes it's as though he sat down and planned out what students could say about his book in English seminars.  No doubt one day they will say it all.

Sam Leroux is a man with no fixed abode, an English professor without tenure; born and raised in South Africa, but lately resident in the US.  The opening chapter of Absolution finds him back in Cape Town in the presence of his literary idol, the great South African novelist Clare Wald.  Wald has agreed to let him write her authorised biography and, because he studies her work and for other reasons too, Sam is eager to fulfill the commission.  But she is ungracious and he is nervous.  As they talk , Sam narrating to us the discomfort of their encounter, they circle around each others secrets.  Neither trusts the other.  It is an unexpectedly negative dynamic between a great writer and her most avid reader.  In a later self-narrated chapter Clare muses:

He is my guest and I his hostage.  I have invited him into my life because I was curious, because I thought, foolishly, that on my terms meant in my control.  But he is always coming from more than one direction.  He does not himself know what he thinks of me.  I suppose there is a kind of power in that, but I am too exhausted for an exercise of power... He is like a beast that feigns vulnerability to put its prey at ease.

Sam's power over Clare is not unlike the power of the reader over her texts. (Barthes: check!)  As the novel unfolds it emerges that Sam and Clare are more closely connected than the average author and reader.  Clare's daughter Laura, who was involved in the militant anti-apartheid movement and who may or may not be dead, was a significant figure in Sam's childhood.  His own parents were killed while plotting a bomb attack on a police station, and Laura saved him from a terrifying and chaotic childhood with his abusive Uncle Bernard.   Both he and Clare are desperate to learn what happened to Laura.  Both have their speculations: one of the other narrative threads is a long letter that Clare writes to Laura's ghost, fictionalising what happened to her before she disappeared; another is Sam's boyish perspective on the last days he spent with her in the late 1980s.  Their stories converge and diverge and converge again. Laura never speaks for herself. 

There are so many angles on Laura's story: she died, she lived; she was for or against apartheid; she cared for Sam or abandoned him; she was a hero or a murderer.  Neither Sam nor Clare is an impartial witness on her life.  Sam was just a child when he knew Laura, and his memory of events, places and people from that time are fuzzy, blurred by distance, trauma and (probably) some conscious forgetting.  There are several hints that Clare is not only addled by guilt and regret, but also suffering from the earliest stages of dementia.  Add to that the general atmosphere of paranoia and fear in the book, and what you have is a maelstrom of possible narratives, outcomes, histories, all of them more or less true and false.

It's very fitting that there should be no clarity in the matter.  Flanery's South Africa  is a place where it is impossible to parse out the rights and wrongs of the past without stumbling into the great gaping abyss between black and white.  The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is name-checked many times in the novel, it's job having been to air the grief and trauma of apartheid human rights violations and to help the country come to terms with its past.  Clare has looked for her daughter's name in the record.   It appears in many forms, further destabilising her identity: 'Lara, Lora, Laure, even Laurie, only sometimes Laura.  Welt, Wal, Wereld, World, and finally in the last one I read, Wald, and sometimes, even in that one, Waldt and Weldt.  Often your name is not there at all...'   Just as the TRC never gets to the bottom of Laura's fate for Clare's sake, so it doesn't get to the bottom of the South Africa's bigger tragedies.  Sam is faced with the reality of returning home to a country in which affluent families (predominantly white) live in gated communities, protected by multiple gates and electrified barb wire with panic buttons in every room and even on the inside of cupboards, just in case they find themselves backed into a burrow like a rabbit. 

Both he and Clare experience a 'house invasion' during the course of the novel, a crime that seems unique to South Africa, combining the threat of burglary, rape and murder all in one terrifying package.  Flanery's novel does well to show the psychological impact of this high security (and high segregation) society, while also showing how Sam and Clare struggle to uphold their ideals and to live open lives.  Sam gives money to black South Africans in the street, and to beggars in cafes; he feels sympathy for the car parking attendant and gives him a large tip.  Clare pays for her maid's dental care, and her gardener's son to go to school.  But neither trusts a stranger, nor even an employee of many years, if they are black.  Sam is visited by a black student of his aunt's after her death.  He keeps the man standing on the step, with the burglar bars still across, although the man has only brought a condolence card and kind wishes:

Sam wondered why this kind of exchange, which should have been so natural and appropriate, was something he could not bring himself to do properly.  If the man had been white he would not have thought twice about letting him in.  He could not think of himself as a racist, he was sure he was not, but one had to be careful.  Everyone must understand that one had to be careful.

Absolution is about an impossible act of forgiveness for this kind of 'being careful', this seemingly inevitable slippage into racial stereotypes.  Sam and Clare have their guilt about Laura and what she did and what they did to her, but this is just a tiny thing compared to the nauseating and overwhelming national guilt felt by every character in the novel.  It is the guilt of people who were made complicit in the oppression and grinding down of their fellow human beings simply by virtue of having been born white in South Africa.   The problem they are left with in the aftermath is one of belonging: is it enough to have been born in a country to belong to it?  What does it mean to live in a country where you have to live in constant fear of your life?  How do you overcome the barriers of racial hatred and stereotype when an 'open life' is so dangerous?  Sam's friend Greg has experienced two house invasions in an 'open' community before retreating to a gated village patrolled 24 hours a day:

One day while he was at work an intruder beat his five dogs to death.  'You can almost get over that.  At least I wasn't there,' he says. 'But when you face the man who wants to take everything from you because he doesn't have anything himself, and sees us whiteys living like pharoahs.  I don't know how to get over that... I locked myself in the study.  I cried in there, thinking I might die... I was too terrified to confront him. What does that say about me?  I think maybe it says we shouldn't live here any more.  We don't belong here now. But I can't imagine living anywhere else.

For this alone I found Absolution very provoking, although there is much more going on that I can't mention for fear of spoilers.  I can't help thinking how sad Alan Paton would be to see the reality of the post-apartheid world. 

Just one thing about Absolution - it has a completely white perspective.  This is limiting, purposefully so I guess, but limiting nevertheless.  I'm keen to read more South African fiction to round this out, and have picked up Andre Brink's A Dry White Season as my next TBR read.  I really am on a South Africa kick, as I'm also reading Zoo City by Lauren Beukes right now.   Do you have any other South African novels I must try?

~~Victoria~~

A Westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West

The harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins, that I was playing a game by somebody else's rules.

Each telephone call with my parents reminded me of my cowardice and my betrayal. I was at once happy to hear their voices and ashamed to talk to them.

By now - after bestseller status and a rather wonderful film adaptation - Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis needs little introduction, I imagine. It is a brave, funny, thorny and thoughtful story-memoir about memory, loss and cultural identity, which was originally published in French in four volumes between 2000 and 2003 (the complete English translation was published in 2006; I cannot find a name for the translator of the first two parts, but the latter two were by Anjali Singh).

(Aside: Not for the first time, I find myself wistfully aware of how much more interesting the French comics industry is than its English-language equivalent, and also how little I know about where to go next. Can anyone reading this recommend some titles? I don't mind whether they're in English translation or not; I'm comfortable enough reading French, though far from fluent, and it would be good to practice on something other than academic articles.)

Persepolis is told through a combination of strikingly high-contrast black-and-white art and first-person narration, and it centres on a version of the author as she grows up in Iran and Austria before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. While in large part the story Persepolis tells is a charmingly and candidly autobiographical one, it is also an act of witness and remembrance for the people and the history of Iran, too, as Satrapi - who now lives in Paris - explains in a brief foreword. It is, she says, an attempt to offer a contrast to the prevalent external image of Iran as a place of "fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism".

The first half of the book is devoted to Marjane's childhood in Iran. She is the precocious, opinionated, and sheltered child of an "avant-garde" family, given to extravagant fantasies about herself ("I was born with religion. At the age of six I was already sure I was the last prophet") and her family's role in the history of a very old and very proud country. But there is a stark contrast between the cheerful, charming, curved-lines imaginings of her ancestors fighting lions:

...and the grimmer realities of Iranian politics that begin to creep into her young awareness. When she overhears her father talking about how a cinema hosting a protest meeting burned down that evening, its doors locked from the outside to prevent the Shah's opponents from leaving and the fire brigade nowhere to be seen for forty minutes, the three-quarter page image she dreams up is much more jagged:

Through the stories of her relatives, she begins to learn about the effects of the Shah's repression, and to realise that her happy world is a precarious one. Her grandmother explains that her grandfather, the elephant-riding man above, was arrested and tortured as a possible enemy of the regime; in what will become a pattern in her life, Marjane responds by internalising this knowledge and attempting to mimic the situation, so as to better understand it:

(The chap on the left-hand side of the panel is not her grandfather, but God, with whom she has a number of conversations during her early life.)

At the same time - in tandem with the progress towards the revolution of 1979, and in large part as a (perhaps unintended) consequence of her parents' vaguely left-wing politics - Marjane comes to recognise the privileged comfort in which she lives, and develops a naive and unfocused, but nonetheless raw, sense of middle-class guilt.

Despite the suffering of some of her relatives, her family remains a wealthy one (hence, one suspects, their avant-gardeness - it is a fashion statement of the rich). There are other ways to suffer, Marjane realises, besides imprisonment at the hands of the state. In light of this new awareness, she recounts how Mehri, the family's maid, came to work for her parents:

When Mehri develops a crush on a young man next door, it becomes apparent that Marjane's father's egalitarian ideals only stretch so far. Mehri, we learn, is illiterate - despite the fact that she has lived with Marjane's family for over a decade, they have never seen fit to see her educated on even a basic level - and so Marjane innocently offers to help her by writing love letters to her crush. When he learns what is going on, however, Marjane's father puts a stop to things in no uncertain terms: the young man in question is the son of the family next door, whereas Mehri is only a maid and "In this country, you must stay within your own social class."

Marjane is still young, though, and Satrapi makes it clear that her awareness, too, is limited. Partly, this is done by showing Marjane be a bit of a brat every so often; my (morbid) favourite was when, after the overthrow of the Shah and the release of large numbers of surviving political prisoners, she tramples all over the careful, comforting lies one of her friends has been told about the whereabouts of her father. "Don't you know", she tells the other girl loftily, "that when they keep saying someone is on a trip it really means he is dead?" Cue traumatised child and much parental disapproval, to which Marjane's response is not compassion for the upset girl but a march to her room filled with wounded dignity, and the narrated caption, "Nobody will accept the truth."

When the Shah finally gets the boot, Marjane is not the only whose optimism is cruelly trampled. (In all this, Marjane becomes something like an embodiment of Iran, all dreams of past glories, passionate attachment to the cause, and crushing disappointment.) Her uncle has high hopes that the religious authorities' dominance after the revolution of 1979 is only temporary:

 

It is not only hindsight, though, that makes it clear this won't be so. Again, Marjane is the voice of Iran, buffeted by the winds of change and believing what she hears:

The tumble into a new repression is swift, and perhaps not helped by the fact that so many of the mobile elite - the educated and the wealthy - quietly flee the country, leaving the poor and the optimistic to the mercies of the regime.

And then the war with Iraq begins, and things become worse still. Satrapi's words and art offer a moving testimony to the way the war tears up a generation of young men, and leaves everyone else in a state persistent, paralysing horror. As the bombing begins to hit residential areas, it takes on the tenor of a war for survival, and the poor and the young are co-opted to be its loudest supporters and most eager martyrs. The scars, though, run deep; the images Marjane conjures of how she remembers the sloganeering propaganda and the aftermath are eloquently grim:

The poor and the young are co-opted, too, into the enforcement of social conservatism, and the chador-clad silhouettes of disapproving women stalk Marjane like crows eyeing up a meal (click for a larger version of this image):

The final panel's little dig at the liberated western world's own repressions is pointed, and an indication of what is to come; but for the time being the focus remains firmly on life inside Iran. Marjane's parents consider leaving the country, since they have the means, but reject the idea for the time being, knowing that life elsewhere will be difficult in its own ways ("Maybe we should leave too..." says Marjane's mother; "So that I can become a taxi driver and you a cleaning lady?" replies her father).

Marjane, though - with a child's sense of melodrama, if not an unjustified one - sees her future prospects narrowing before her eyes. She longs to follow in the footsteps of Marie Curie, but reflects with alarm that by the time she is the age at which Curie studied chemistry, she will "probably have ten children". Again, Satrapi is not afraid to poke gentle fun at her younger self, even as she makes a serious point:

At length, Marjane's parents decide to send her to school in Vienna; again, their social class and wealth gives Marjane more options and protection that many of her peers enjoy. With trepidation and grief, Marjane leaves Iran and her family behind:

The second part of the book focuses on Marjane's experiences abroad, and her decision to return home, despite everything. The central theme is dislocation: while Marjane is out of step with the behavourial norms that are being enforced - if not exactly embraced by all - in Iran, she also finds herself at odds with much of what she encounters in Europe.

On her arrival, she is greeted by a family friend named Shirin who has been abroad for some time, and Shirin's shiny superficiality (her conversation includes such gems as "This is my raspberry-scented pen, but I have strawberry and blackberry ones, too") is jarring to an earnest adolescent who has left behind a brutalised and brutalising country. It is not hard to imagine that Shirin's bright chatter is as much deliberate displacement mechanism as anything - that she feels some pain over what people she knows are suffering back home, and doesn't really know how to deal with that or what to say about it - but it strikes the first blow of Marjane's disillusionment. (And a survivor's guilt of her own at having escaped.)

Marjane meets many generous and well-meaning people, and is able to exercise her nimble mind through a lot of energising and radicalising books (and some rather less so). She makes friends, gains a boyfriend, and learns to cope - sort of - on her own. But she is irritated by the cynicism she meets: the way many of her oh-so-intellectual friends, cushioned by their privilege just as Marjane herself once was, treat the sorts of things she has experienced as items of abstract interest, to be discussed with studied, rational cool but certainly not something to get emotional over:

The mohawk guy here, Momo, embodies this, delivering pseudo-insightful speeches like, "Life is pain. Pain is everything. Everything is nothingness. Therefore life is nothingness. When man recognizes this hole, he can no longer live like an earthworm, inventing games of leaders and followers to forget his fickleness." When Marjane snaps back, "There are people who give their lives for values like liberty", he sneers, "It's just a distraction from boredom." He, again, is young and naive, but - understandably - it stings Marjane nonetheless to hear Iran's traumas so summarily dismissed.

Marjane also struggles both with overt racism and with a more pervasive sense of not-belonging, of having to constantly represent her country to others. A long awaited visit from her mother is a relief and a haven, soothing aches and pains she had hardly even realised were slowly but surely wearing her down ("It relaxed me to talk to her. It had been so long since I'd been able to talk to someone without having to explain my culture"). She does her best to blend in, to find a middle way:

But the strain of it all sends her spiralling into substance abuse and depression. Naturally, when she returns to the home she has longed for, she finds things no easier for her hybrid self ("I was nothing. I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the west. I had no identity"). But she does at least have the comfort of her family around her, and a cause she can become involved in.

Satrapi's portrayal of her/Marjane's whirlwind relationship with the attractive Reza is both clear-eyed and saddening. It reminded me of the melancholy section of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake when her protagonist Gogol gets married, to a fellow Bengali-American. In both cases, the marriage is in some sense an attempt to make peace with the past, and reclaim a heritage that the character has previously betrayed and deserted, and feels lost without; in both cases, this pressure of expectation on the marriage, this collision of identities, causes it to fracture.

For Marjane, too, the marriage is derailed by a conflict between two different measures of freedom, each equally precious to her. On the one hand, being back home means she is once again free to be Iranian, and be among Iranians, without apology or negotiation, without trying to assimilate herself to another culture and rethink her every utterance in another language. On the other hand, she cannot be an Iranian woman in Iran without compromising in other ways: in how she dresses in public, in the opinions she voices, and in the way she interacts with men, including Reza. When you have to worry about whether a strand of your hair is showing every time you leave the house, she reflects, you start to lose your grip on the wider issues like whether you have freedom of speech or a say in government. Life is a constant, low-level harassment that could erupt into more at any time.

The contradiction between the public and the private self becomes oppressive. She and Reza marry in a hurry because it is the only way they can be together publicly; but the rush means that they have no chance to get to know each other properly, and to discover that they are, in fact, deeply incompatible.

What is heartening about Persepolis, and challenging to western assumptions about the lives of women in places like Iran, is the level of accommodation and subversion with which the rules are approached. The veil, for example, does not guarantee meek feminine submission, although its enforcement on a state level clearly seeks that; nor are decisions about how and why it is worn remotely simple (or always coerced) on an individual or even a community level. Satrapi has (wistful) fun showing her younger self flanked by many other girls in her irreverent non-conformity:

But she also repeatedly shows the ways in which adult Iranian woman create and defend spaces of self-expression and self-determination. They are eloquent, they are determined, they are organised, and often they are also un-ignorably loud:

They also - and in this Satrapi's portrayals remind me very much of women I encountered in Syria and Jordan when I visited there in 2010 - stretch and test both the law and wider cultural expectations at every turn, and as far as they can. Even outward conformity can hide a wealth of small rebellions:

~~Nic

Let Dog Eat Dog

Ignorance is at the root of media failure. Most of the time most journalists do not know what they are talking about. Their stories may be right, or they may be wrong: they don't know. [...] They work in structures which positively prevent them from discovering the truth. The ethic of honesty has been overwhelmed by the mass production of ignorance.

Ah, the curse of procrastination. When I finished reading Nick Davies' Flat Earth News (2010) in June last year, it could not have felt more timely. Here was the story behind the headlines: a meticulous but highly readable discussion of the systemic pressures and chronic weaknesses that made something like the News of the World's phone-hacking scandal essentially inevitable. I would write about it soon, I promised myself. Very soon.

Yes. I know.

In the meantime, the subject hasn't exactly become less relevant - the daily feeds from the Leveson enquiry bring ever more fascinating and disturbing details to light, and with each passing week Murdoch's grip on things looks shakier - but it has certainly lost something of its urgency. (I include a link to a Telegraph piece partly because the Torygraph criticising incestuous ties between business and government is always funny, but also for this priceless comment, in which one reader opines that "Corruption and bribery have risen in this country at the same rate that we have allowed in Third World immigrants" - it's like this country's entire quota of stupid in beautiful, horrible microcosm.)

Anyway. Davies combines a number of case studies of when the Press goes bad - including the baseless Y2K panic, climate change denialism, the Observer's support for the Iraq war, the Daily Mail's, well, standard operating procedures - with an authoritative overarching analysis that explains how and why such things happen. He draws on a wide range of insider testimonies, together with quantitative research carried out for him by the Journalism department at Cardiff University, to piece together the steps of his stories. Along the way, he tackles various myths and shibboleths of modern discourse regarding The News: the notion that neutrality is the same thing as objectivity, for example, such that all 'views' on an issue must be given equal weight - even when some of those views are utterly loony fringe narratives (as tackled on a regular basis by the likes of Ben Goldacre), or created out of whole cloth by paid PR firms. Journalists, he explains, have largely abdicated their responsibility to distinguish and discriminate between different versions of events, between reality and its distortion; most of the time, they no longer chase down the truth, or even check facts.

The cause of this is not malice or mendacity on the part of individual journalists (although in some cases that comes into it). Rather, it is about a series of industry-wide shifts in the way reporting is commissioned, edited, financed and presented, together with a downward circulation spiral - which, in turn, threatens the real revenue stream, advertising - that looks unlikely to be arrested. The logic of commerce, of course, is profit for shareholders; and, where revenues are in decline, costs must be cut. In the media, this cost-cutting has seen staffing budgets slashed further and further - even as the space to be filled with copy has tripled. Quality, inevitably, is sacrificed: the complex, multi-faceted stories are pushed out by the celebrity puff-pieces; the long-term investigations make way for near verbatim accounts of speeches a politician will deliver that day, courtesy of the party's press office; local and specialist reporters are laid off in droves, with things like science reporting and stories that take place outside London left to generalists at the centre without the skills, knowledge or contacts to do them justice, if they are written at all.

One example given of the latter is a police raid on a house in Lancashire in October 2006, which uncovered, according to Davies "what was believed to be the largest collection of chemical explosives ever found in the UK". One of two men arrested had strong links to the British National Party. The story was barely seen in national press, however, because the police chose not to do a press release about it - thus offering no ready-made copy to be recycled - and the national papers had no local reporters on the ground. Only one person wrote about it: Wendy Barlow, a freelance court reporter, for the Lancashire Telegraph. The BBC made a vague effort to follow up her story, but lacked the resources to back up such an effort, and soon gave up in favour of items within closer reach.

The central problem, argues Davies, is that the media's apparent neutrality only cloaks other selection processes - processes driven by profit margins and propaganda - that give us a far from objective account of the world. Financial pressures mean that journalism has been progressively "deskilled". Chasing the news has become a "luxury", and a generation of reporters are now largely reduced to "churnalism" - that is, to processing copy pre-prepared for them by the news wire services (themselves subject to the same financial restrictions) and the myriad public relations firms attached to businesses, politicians, celebrities and the like. Davies notes that "on the best available estimates, Britain now has more PR people (47,800) than journalists (45,000)". Research carried out on his behalf at Cardiff University drives home this point. Researchers analysed a sample of two weeks of reporting, chosen at random, in five national newspapers: the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Times, the Independent, and the Daily Mail. Their figures are striking. Of 2207 pieces on domestic news, 60% were found to consist wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material; 20% had clear elements of same; 8% were difficult to identify; and only 12% - twelve percent of all the news stories about events in the UK - were wholly written by a given newspaper's own reporters.

A great many of these stories that are fed to the newspapers are run unverified; another cost-cutting measure has been to vastly reduce the manpower and manhours given to fact checking. What we are getting is not neutrality, but propaganda and groupthink: a shill for the views of whoever has the time and money to put out a press release.

Some of these things are, individually, relatively harmless. These are the non-stories created for businesses by PR firms, usually involving an online survey whose results are trumpeted in a press release as 'The Nation's Favourite X'. Another version of this is the utterly bogus mathematical formula. You've almost certainly seen or heard news coverage given over the revelation that a 'scientist' has determined the most depressing day of the year; originally a faux-story dreamed up by a travel agent, Sky Travel, looking to boost sales of package holidays by convincing people they're really sad, this tall tale still turns up in the press with, frankly, depressing regularity. Here's the Guardian joining in the chorus about it yet again last year, followed by a slightly embarrassed arse-covering version a week later, after commenters on the earlier story pointed out that Ben Goldacre had snarked about the phenomenon in its own pages two years earlier. Silly space-fillers, perhaps, but collectively they suck the oxygen out of real news stories, because they're so much easier and cheaper to use, however baseless:

On a single Monday in November 2005, the Guardian ran nine different survey stories on its news pages, and the Sun ran nine others. Some of them are statistically baseless. One PR outfit, acting for a company who wanted to set up a service for finding lost mobile phones, informed the media that 63,000 mobile phones had been left in London taxis over the previous six months. The real figure, according to the Public Carriage Office, was 779. The survey, it turned out, was based on talking to precisely 131 out of the 24,000 cabbies in London. Still, the story got used.

On a larger scale, though, this sort of practice results in non-stories turning into government-convulsing panics, like the so-called 'Millennium Bug', in which the journalistic echo chamber - fed by vested interests benefitting from the money that was poured into solving the imaginary problem, and legions of commentators who lacked the expertise or the time to find out whether there was any substance in it whatsoever (there wasn't) - turned a rumour into a worldwide, rock-solid catastrophe-in-the-making:

This is Flat Earth News. A story that appears to be true. It is widely accepted as true. It becomes a heresy to suggest that it is not true - even if it is riddled with falsehood, distortion and propaganda.

In this, as in almost everything else, supply has come to dictate demand. The easy story - the one generating the reams of accessible coverage - goes to the head of the queue day after day, getting the columns inches and the photo spreads that it would otherwise be prohibitively costly and time-consuming to fill.

Sometimes, though, the smokescreen is calculated rather than systemic. Davies devotes a fascinating chapter to the intelligence agency meddling that infects press coverage of Iraq, focusing in particular on the controversial figure of the Jordanian rival of Usama bin Laden, Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi. US and Jordanian intelligence repeatedly tried to link al-Zarqawi with bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, even to the extent of apparently forging a letter supposedly written by al-Zarqawi - filled with complaints that the insurgents were losing the war due to the heroic efforts of US security forces ("Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases. By God, this is suffocation!") - and then 'leaking' it to the media. Some of the press release-fuelled stories coming out of Iraq detailed here really are hilariously stupid; my favourite is one concocted in support of the assault on Fallujah:

One, which was widely used, scored an important point for the legitimacy of the assault by reporting that US troops had found Zarqawi's headquarters in Fallujah. This was described as "an imposing building with concrete columns and a sign in Arabic on the wall reading 'al-Qaeda organisation'. Most reporters simply failed to comment on the profundly surprising idea that the most hunted terrorist group in the world would advertise its presence as though it were a branch of Woolworths (and the worrying fact that, in spite of this open declaration of its whereabouts, this imposing building had failed to be targeted by any of the US Air Force's 'precision strikes').

And sometimes, too, the newspapers are not the semi-innocent victims of evil press releases, but practitioners of outright mendacity themselves. Further commentary on Rupert Murdoch ("He uses his media outlets as tools to secure political favours, and he uses those political favours to advance his business") and his empire is probably unnecessary at this stage. But what Davies has to say about the Daily Mail is quite breathtaking. Not so much in terms of the naked bigotry of the paper's chief concerns - a quick skim of its website makes that clear enough - but of the "spiteful aggression" and bloody-minded, deliberate falsehoods with which it pursues that agenda.

The Mail is the only major newspaper in this country that still comfortably turns a profit - think about that for a moment, and weep - and this enables it to cushion its reporters (/'reporters') from the effects of an editorial strategy that sees Press Complaints Commission investigations against the Mail upheld three times more than the national average. The litany of hate-mongering, political policy-shaping campaigns against anything and everything that threatens lower middle class 'values' - immigration, uppity women, celebrities who refuse to play ball, people who aren't white breathing respectable English air with impunity - really has to be read in full to be believed. One short anecdote will have to suffice, to end this post:

I spoke to a man who had worked for the Daily Mail for some years as a senior news reporter. He said: "They phoned me early one morning and told me to drive about three hundred miles to cover a murder. It was a woman and her two children who'd been killed. I got an hour and a half into the journey, and the news desk called me on my mobile and said, 'Come back.' I said, 'Why's that?' They said, 'They're black.'"

~~Nic

It is not in my heart to hate...

NB: There are spoilers in the latter half of this review.

My intention was to write about Jane Harris' Gillespie and I but instead I find my thoughts turning relentlessly to Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved County (1948).  It's a book of Big Emotions and I feel as though I have to release them before I can come back to Harris' late Victorian pastiche.  I picked it up on a whim last week but it isn't whimsical.  Sonorous, spiritual, a little sentimental perhaps, but not a whiff of whimsy about it.  And I didn't expect there would be: this is a classic of South African fiction, written on the cusp of apartheid about a country riven by political and racial difference.  Big Themes to go with the Big Emotions.

Stephen Kumalo is an aging Anglican priest, who has lived out his life in the village of Ndotsheni in the Umzimkulu valley in Natal.  Drought and poverty are the twin stars of his later life; his little leaking church shelters only infants, women and old people.  Everyone else has gone to work in the mines or to the towns.  The situation is dire, almost apocolyptic:

The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn away like flesh.  The lightning flashes over them, the clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the red blood of the earth. Down in the valleys women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man.  They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children. The men are away, the young men and the girls are away.  The soil cannot keep them anymore.

This last statement is true in two senses: it cannot support them bodily, and it cannot keep them at home in the face of the temptations of modern life.  Kumalo's own brother, sister and only son have all left the valley to go to Johannesburg and have not returned.  They haven't sent news in years; and then Stephen receives a letter from a fellow clergyman in Johannesburg, saying that his sister is ill and he must come to her.  His wife agrees that he must go, and while he is there he can seek out their son, their only child, Absalom.  And so off he goes on the train, travelling for several days, this old man who has barely left his valley.  Everywhere is multiplicity, choice, boggling profusion:

One must catch buses, but not as here [Natal], where the only bus that comes is the right bus.  For there there is a multitude of buses, and only one bus in ten, one bus in twenty maybe, is the right bus.  If you take the wrong bus, you may travel to quite some other place.  And they say it is danger to cross the street, yet one must needs cross it.

The news in Johannesburg is 'heavy' on Kumalo: he discovers his sister living in a den of prostitutes and his brother astranged from the church, involved in dangerous politics. But his son, worse and worse, has just commited a burglary and in the process has shot and killed a white man.  Not just any white man either, but (in the way of novels) the progressive son of the English landowner at Ndotsheni, James Jarvis.  Kumalo must live through this, supporting his son through the trial, facing the shame of the disintegration of his family and the death of his tribal pride.  His only help comes from city strangers, the chief amongst whom is Msimangu, the priest who first wrote to him.

Cry.. was Paton's first novel, written in 1946 during his time as Principal of the Diepkloof Reformatory for young (Black African) offenders.  It expresses his deep and aching frustration at the injustice of South African racial politics, and the widening divide between white and black.  It was published in America and the UK just months before the National Party came to power and introduced their apartheid policies.  It was banned in South Africa itself, not because it presents 'native criminals' in a sympathetic light, but because it strikes a balance between the fear and confusion of the white ruling classes, and the poverty and degradation of the black South Africans.  It shows the situation from both sides: Kumalo's point of view opens the novel, but Book 2 switches to look through the eyes of James Jarvis, the father of the murdered man. 

It is a surpisingly practical book in some ways; it doesn't bemoan the problem, it wants to find a solution for it.  "It is not in my heart to hate a white man" says Msimangu,  "It was a white man who brought my father out of darkness... The tragedy is not that things are broken.  The tragedy is that they are not mended again."   There is very little dwelling on the traumatic colonial past; it is the mistakes of the present that focus the narrative.  Msimangu more than any character seems like Paton's own voice.  He thinks that now or never is the time for change: "I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating."

The contemporary urgency of the novel means that, inevitably, it has the passion of polemic.  The reader is an audience to the narrator's exhortations and exclamations.  The tone is sometimes fraught, even hysterical:

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear.  Let him not love the earth too deeply... For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much. 

Paton poses the question of how the wounds of division could be mended but then despairs: We do not know, we do not know.  We shall lived from day to day and put more locks on the doors... And our lives will shrink...the light of life will be thrust down.

Is it too much?  It would be now, I think, if this were a retrospective novel about apartheid, a historical novel.  But Paton was in the moment, writing a novel with an ultimately hopeful tone in an apparently hopeless, intractable situation.  The divisions he sees run right to the depth of South African society, and they aren't only racial.  They are generational too.  There is Stephen, deferential, respectful - "A white man's dog, that is what they called him and his kind. Well, that was the way his life had been lived, and that was the way he would die" - and James Jarvis, condescending, proud, but firmly fair.  Compare this with a younger generation, struggling to come to terms with an identity, and to find a place in the world. "It was the white man who gave us so little land, a young agricultural worker tells Stephen, "it was the white man who took us away from the land to go to work.  And we were ignorant also.  It is all these things together that have made this valley desolate. Therefore, what this good white man does it only a repayment."   How can the wounds caused and accepted by one generation be healed by another?

God it seems, is Paton's answer. God and - inspired by God, through belief in God - human kindness. Msimungu offers a suggestion: "I can see only one hope for our country, and that is when white and black men, desiring neither power nor money, but desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it."  This is one interpretation of what happens in the end, with Jarvis and Kumalo working together to restore the valley at Ndotsheni.  Theirs is a stirring narrative of forgiveness and empathy, and the portrait of these aging opposites, finally coming to understand one another, is incredibly moving. 

Paton is not so naive as to think that this kind of mutual charity and feeling can heal the breach in a whole nation. Stephen admits..."might not another man, returning to another valley, have found none of these things? Why was it given one man to have his pain transmuted into gladness?  And might not another, having no sure awareness, live with pain that never ended?"  The novelistic coincidences are brought out and aired: "Why was there a compulsion upon him to pray for the restoration of Ndotsheni, and why was there a white man there on the tops, to do in this valley what no other could have done?  And why of all men, the father of the man who had been murdered by his son?"

Still the workings of God are strong in Cry - the cadences are biblical, and the answers to all its riddles end in faith.  The effect of the book relies, to a great extent, on giving ourselves up to the ineffable mystery of a saviour, and engaging with the gospel parables of sacrifice, redemption and resurrection. Paton was a devoted Christian, and it shows, and (dare I say?) it works here.  Even the stubbornest non-believing cell in my body couldn't help but respond to the imagery of the final moments of the novel, when Stephen Kumalo witnesses the sun rise, as it has risen every morning for thousands of years, on the morning of his son's execution. 

~~Victoria~~

My Noble Master's Dog

I read Mikhail Bulgakov's novella A Dog's Heart (Penguin Classics, trans. Andrew Bromfield) all in one day, so quickly that it never even appeared in my Currently Reading sidebar.  It was one of those spur of the moment, pick-it-up-just-to-see kind of reads.  I was hooked in by the first short, direct sentences:

Whoo-hoo-oo-hoo-oo-oo!  Oh, just look at me, look I'm dying here.  The blizzard's singing my last rites under the gate, and I'm howling along.  I'm done for, I'm finished.

116 pages later and it was all over.  The howling narrator is Sharik, a mangy stray dog on the streets of 1920s Moscow.  He's had it pretty rough, having been kicked, beaten and abused all of his short brutal life.  It has made him cunning, and desperate.  When a well-dressed bourgeoisie approaches him in the street, offers him a snaffle of salami and then lures him home, he's more than eager to follow. 'Follow you?' he thinks, 'To the end of the world. Kick me with your felt book if you like, I won't say a word.'  Sharik is grateful for his abasement, so long as it comes with the occasional mouthful of meat. 

He's rather puzzled by his new master Filipp Filippovich, a Professor of Medicine, who has the ear of high-up Party Officials and lives in a huge 7-room apartment with two servants, a cook and a housekeeper-cum-surgical assistant.  He treats patients for unspecified sexual complaints with rather sickening operations: one woman has her aging ovaries replaced with monkey ovaries.  In the evenings, if he doesn't visit the theatre or the opera, he conducts rather ghastly experiments on human brains:

Sharik lay in the shadow on the carpet and gazed in fascination at the appaling goings-on.  There were human brains lying in repulsive, cloudy, acrid fluid in glass jars.  With his arms bare to the elbows and reddish rubber gloves on his hands, the Deity [Sharik sees him as a God]  fumbled in the convolutions with slippery, unfeeling fingers.  Sometimes the Deity would arm himself with a little gleaming knife...

Evidently these sinister activities do not bode well for poor Sharik.  As soon as he has put on weight and returned to good health, he is subjected to experimentation by Filipp Filoppovich and his assistant, Dr Bormenthal.  First his testicles are removed and replaced with human testicles; and then his pituatary gland likewise.  There is little to no expectation that he will survive, but survive he does, and with horrifying consequences.  Sharik begins to change: his hair falls out, his limbs lengthen, and then he begins to speak.

Disturbing, yes?  All this is set against the upheaval in Russia following the death of Lenin, before the rise and rise of Stalin.  Filipp Filippovich is a dying breed, a remnant of the middle classes, and soon to become an anachronism.  The housing association for his building, led by the passionately Marxist Shvonder, are outraged by his privilege, which he openly flaunts.  'You hate the proletariat!' the woman said fervently. 'Yes, I'm not fond of the proletariat,' Filipp Filippovich agreed sadly'.  He bemoans what he sees as the collapse of civilisation during the Revolution of 1917.   Galoshes are his curious marker: before 1917 he could leave his dirty galoshes at the door of the apartment building, but during the Revolution they were stolen from the stand.  Now you couldn't leave galoshes or they will be pinched.  'Why can't the proletariat leave it's galoshes downstairs, why does it trail mud across the marble?' he groans, 'Why in damnation did they remove the plants from the landing?'

You could almost feel sorry for this relict of a more gentile age if he wasn't so clearly a psychopathic nutter, a truly mad scientist of the old school.  Sharik is his Frankenstein's monster.  The consequences of his meddling are both simple and complex, straightforward and allegorical.  There is little wonder that the original manuscript of the story was seized by censors in 1925 or that it remained unpublished until 1987.  Bulgakov's story is the most damaging kind of critique for a regime: it is fiercely critical of the status quo but doesn't descend into staightforward nostalgia for an old way of doing things.  Both present and past ways are flawed; so flawed as to be positively grotesque. 

Bulgakov is a piquant writer and I find his descriptions irresistable.  The pleasure in this story for me was not (unsurprisingly?) the savage transformation of a dog into a man, but the sentence-by-sentence construction of the world.  The blizzard that 'cracks its rifle above their heads'; the 'weeping piece of cheese on a heavy board and caviar in a silver tub heaped around with snow'; and 'the table, as heavy as a tombstone'.  The angry ugliness of the satire is a little salved by this evidencing of solid reality.  It invites a sort of poignancy into the story and humanises the characters who would otherwise be straightforward caricatures.  It gives a necessary balance: it means that A Dog's Heart is not just a parable, but a grounded story too.

~~Victoria~~