The Killings in Northern Ireland

Early this week PoliticsHome surveyed its political mates in the know, most of whom seemed to feel that Sinn Fein's first public response to the killing by republican dissidents of two British soldiers at Massereene Barracks was, in the well-known phrase, "mealy-mouthed." "One left-leaning media panellist says: 'Sinn Fein has to decide which side it is on.'" Interestingly a Tory MP told PH that he felt Adams gradually got more in synch with the tone of McGuinness, whom he felt 'from the start has been tougher on the dissidents.'

Anyhow, all this has changed, if not utterly, since the killing of the Catholic police constable Stephen Carroll, McGuinness's description of the killers as 'traitors', and his call upon PC Carroll's widow in the company of DUP First Minister Peter Robinson. Lord Tom King (who, when Northern Ireland Secretary back in the late 1980s, came to my school one day to open a sports hall) today declared himself impressed by the Sinn Fein leadership: “It's the big test for them, I think. The first couple of days of the real test has been encouraging."

'Traitors' is not a word you will hear Gerry Adams use, for many awkward reasons, rehearsed in this Times article by Kevin Toolis which unpicks a wearily familar recent history that I hoped I would never have to revisit. So here we are again. But things have changed, no question.

Back in the far more dangerous early years of the post-Good Friday 'process', the former priest and mediator Dennis Bradley drew on his theological training to advise Sinn Fein that it had to follow the logic of its public position: if the republican movement was In this process and not Out, then there could not be two armies within one state. Bradley, an excellent man from Buncrana, knew exactly where he stood, and was even made to suffer for that stance in a nasty incident at a Derry pub. But the logic remains, has got harder yet, and has clearly impressed itself on McGuinness and on Adams, whomever is the more vocal or less tongue-tied of the two.

Esquire (April 2009) now on stands: includes Clint, + RTK on The Damned United

They say Clint Eastwood has retired from movie acting, though I don't have to believe it, any more than do the many newspaper scribes (some of the same vintage as Clint) who have been penning nostalgic can-this-really-be-the-end? pieces in the wake of Gran Torino. (Peter Preston, for instance, former Guardian editor and film buff, who must quietly fancy himself as a bit of a veteran gunslinger.)

In any event, Clint the Director marches on. The Cannes Festival just gave him an honorary lifetime-achievement Palme d'Or, something they only bestowed once before, on Ingmar Bergman no less. Whatever you think of Clint the auteur, it's a fact that had he not existed then French film critics would have had to invent him, so closely does he resemble what they require American Cinema to be, or to mean.

Anyhow, here's Clint on the cover of another excellent issue of Esquire, just out. My contribution this ish is a piece about the new film version of David Peace's The Damned United. Among the more digestible things I say therein, this gobbet, after describing the picture as 'a typically English love story':

"[The film] shouldn’t be judged against Peace’s novel, but nor should it be forgotten that the novel is essentially a hate story – specifically the demoniac hatred Peace’s Clough feels for Revie and Leeds, worsened by other baneful spirits (including booze.)

Alastair Campbell: Reading Him Writing on His Watching Himself

As blogs go, Alastair Campbell's is of more obvious interest than most, although - as with his bestselling Diaries, and as with the public pronouncements of his former boss - you really have to read hard between the lines to separate what he means from how he wishes you to see him. But then that's also true of a lot of less famous bloggers...

Still, if you want to really tie yourself into knots on the subject of the relatively small but endlessly dynamic and self-referential world of Meeja, do read Campbell's account of attending a private screening of Armando Ianucci's already much-acclaimed movie In The Loop, and his careful explanation of exactly how, why and when he will be contributing to the publicity drive for the film. You could say it's a study of a master at work; or you might feel less charitable; or whatever. Mr Campbell won't mind, he's made of sterner stuff, as we're quite often reminded.

Miners Strike Redux: David Jenkins & The People

If it's more recall and analysis of the Miners Strike you're after, then there's plenty to read this morning. The Daily Mail is jumping up and down on the corpse of Scargill's 'legacy', assisted by reference to a new book from Francis Beckett and David Hencke, though the sneering eventually winds round to a few critical comments about the Government of the day.

The Guardian have given Scargill space to claim once more that he actually won the thing, at least on principle, and that his hitherto unheralded efforts to reach consensus were spurned. In an editorial far too drab too link to, the Guardian asserts that neither side deserved to win the Strike - this presumably a conscious echo of the famous enthronement sermon of 1984 delivered by David Jenkins as he was became Bishop of Durham, his point being that neither side should lose.

Jenkins was interviewed the other day by the Northern Echo and sounded much like his old self: “I was a friend of the miners and a champion of their families, but I was by no means an uncritical supporter of the NUM. I’d been landed with this, so I had to do something about it. I’m a simple believer and I think God is in favour of people.” If only that last bit were true in any respect, then we'd all be a lot better off, I daresay.

I don't think anybody wanted Crusaders to be longer than it is, even those critics who liked it (though the man at the TLS rather kindly seemed to fancy a few more chapters.) But it does make people laugh (or else groan) when I say that the last few months' work I did on the book was to cut 35,000 words out of it... Among the non-vital stuff that I snipped a good deal sooner, from the midst of the book's revisiting of the Miners Strike, was a bit about the figure of Jenkins, who is the kind of priest that the young John Gore really aspires to be. This is his reaction to hearing that enthronement speech:

"It was good as cracking open a book of an evening to find one's inchoate thoughts of that very afternoon emblazoned on a page in best prose. ‘We are all concerned’, Durham had stressed. He had spoken of communities. He had been most specific about affluence, material gain, how the fortunes of some should not inflict misery on many. And he had lashed the government for its intransigence. For his troubles he had been pelted with calumny ever since... But he seemed to be a fellow ready to stand up in the market square and suffer a stoning. And that, John respected."

Jenkins' own book The Calling of a Cuckoo is worth a read for any interested parties.

David Peace: Cometh the Hour

If you want to feel a bit sick before bedtime, take a look at this skimpy nonsense that the BBC News site has posted up to mark the 25th anniversary of the walkouts that began the last Miners' Strike. Maybe one wouldn't feel so scornful if they hadn't decided to pour a skipload of rubbishy period pop music over the still images; but the effect of same is trivialising at best, and actively loathesome at worst - after all, somebody picked and sequenced that execrable music, just as they picked and sequenced the still photos and the newsreel soundbites, which culminate ('Everything Must Change') in Margaret Thatcher's characteristically deranged, myopic and evil comments on the subject of industrial relations.
But if you turn the sound off and just look at the photos, I daresay one visual element, one creeping stain across all things, will strike you hardest, and that's Uniformed Police, legion upon legion, outnumbering striking miners, any hour of day or night, yes sir. What can one think, but that these officers must have been sorely committed to that cause, or else were being handsomely paid for their pains?
Tonight I was originally minded to pen a few words about the TV adaptation of David Peace's Red Riding which has just begun its run on Channel 4; but thankfully there's plenty more to come on that score. I imagine anyone who watched Episode 1 this evening has come away with somewhat charged feelings about the 'thin blue line' and where it cuts through our body politic. And since all those writers who are truly worth the candle are plugged into currents that run deep and fierce under the endless banalised surface of our society, so it seems fitting that Red Riding is airing to coincide with the miners' unhappy anniversary, since David's novel GB84 is also lying out there in wait for anyone who fancies an account of the Strike that is free of the customary image repertoire (or the strains of the Style Council) and who cares to give some serious thought to the question of who or what is our nation's Enemy Within.

On Digging That Cat Bob Dylan...

It was my friend the massively erudite and prolific author/journalist Kevin Jackson who first introduced me to the technical term 'BobCat', maybe 2-3 years ago now? As I recall, it was while we were dining with the polymathic filmmaker Paul Schrader, a hero to this Blog, and himself a conspicuous BobCat. But the very fact that the whole BobCat business was all news to me as recently as then is testimony to the truth that I'm only a very amateur and third-rate sort of a Bob Dylan Fan.
I do have most of his long-playing records, and I dabble on the fringes of Dylan scholarship, albeit far removed (even alienated) from the serious esoterica and apocrypha. Moreover, like a whole bunch of practising novelists, be they good, bad, or mediocre, I often write with music on for the purpose of mood and glancing inspiration; and so I can say that a fair bit of Crusaders was written to the soundtrack of Dylan's so-called 'Christian' albums (Slow Train Coming, admittedly, much the favourite of these.) But that's about the size of my Bobcatness. (Actually, hang on, for what it's worth there are a few hommages to Dylan lyrics in my The Name of this Book is Dogme 95, which were astutely spotted and thrown back to me by the Copenhagen-based scholar and Bobcat Carsten Jensen.)
So why are these selective Visions of Bob now keeping me up past the dawn? Well, for one thing, the aforementioned K. Jackson recently dropped me a line to let me know he was ploughing 'through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books', and I was slow enough to ask him why... It so happens that Kevin is writing another of his daunting scholarly works, this one on the modernist literature of the 1920s. But still, honestly... No BobCat, I, to have missed that glaring reference. Nonetheless, however weakly, I managed to shoot back to Kevin that I 'couldn't even touch the books he'd read', in point of numbers at least... And we had a good exchange about the particularly Dylanesque love/hate of lists of learned reading, a matter on which Bob expounded further in the little-read Tarantula, which is as near as I get to his esoterica.
Furthermore, me and this Blog are pleased to have received another commendation from the excellent and previously cited The Story and The Truth maintained by Anna French and Dan Hartland; and while rooting round that site I just read this fine essay by Hartland on the 'great late trilogy' formed by Dylan's most recently released trio of albums. Again, like a heretic, I must admit that of the three in question only Time Out of Mind gets much play round my house. But then I played it just the other day, during novel-writing hours... See, I'm tryin' to get to heaven, before they close the door...
On which topic, I must just squeeze in this morsel from Ian Parker's assiduous observational New Yorker profile of Christopher Hitchens, published back in 2006 - one of those journalistic snapshots that just sticks with you, both the story and the telling of it:
"Hitchens went into the house and put on Bob Dylan's 'Tryin' to Get to Heaven'; he stood in the doorway and sung quietly along. He quoted Philip Larkin on Dylan: a 'cawing, derisive voice.' He repeated Larkin's words a few times, approvingly. His daughter got out of the pool, and said, pleasantly, 'Can we close this door, so nobody else has to hear this?'... She went back to her friends. 'Look,' Hitchens said happily. 'They're waiting for us to die.'"

Nicolas Roeg @ BAFTA, March 27, w/ RTK

On Friday March 27 BAFTA will host a tribute evening to Nic Roeg under the banner 'The Magician With A Movie Camera.' And I will have the privilege and fun of being emcee for the night. Here as a refresher is the piece I wrote on the maestro last year for Film In Focus. And the BAFTA site trailers the event with the following text (in which you may note the prominent and valued endorsement of Danny Boyle, a director currently enjoying the best of times):

"Visionary director Nicolas Roeg has created some classics of modern cinema as well as inspiring several generations of world-class filmmakers by virtue of his poetic eye and iconoclastic approach to storytelling. Danny Boyle considers Roeg to be as important as David Lean in the history of British cinema, and it's impossible to keep track of the number of contemporary filmmakers who cite Don't Look Now as among their key influences. With Performance, Bad Timing, The Man Who Fell To Earth and Walkabout, Roeg cemented his place in the modernist canon - but his influence owes as much to his uncompromising approach as to the detail of his personal creative vision. Join us for this evening where some extraordinarily special filmmakers pay tribute to a cinematic hero."

Hero, indeed. Join us, indeed. (The photo of Roeg above is by Dave Sidaway for the Montreal Gazette.)

Bolton 1 Newcastle 0: Are those bells I hear tolling?

Earlier in this awful season Shola Ameobi narrowly missed his chance to play in the old Division 2, for, I think, Ipswich. But, again if I recall right, he failed the medical. No worries, though - Newcastle kept him and also rewarded him with a new contract, clearly keen that he continue to lope on, giving Toon fans a few more years of unfulfilled 'promise', the occasional goal, but very consistent displays of a temperament suggesting that he thinks himself a bit too good for the hectic heat of a contest, and boring stuff like tackling and tracking back.

Anyhow, the raveous maws of Division 2 are yawning wide for Shola once more, just as the bell tolls for NUFC, after today's latest dismal defeat in a season of dismal defeats. I hear the fans booed Mark Viduka's appearance as substitute for Martins, not just at seeing Oba disappear down the tunnel but also because Shola remained on the park. Shola may puzzle over all this, just as he might wonder why he's the only Toon player in living memory not to be newly idolised after scoring a seemingly crucial goal against Sunderland (the reason, I reckon, being that no-one really feels the point won by that equalising penalty at SJP is going to end up amounting to a hill of beans.)

So is this the promised end? 11 games remain. Nobody reckons we'll get any points home to Man U, Chelsea and Arsenal, or at Liverpool or Villa. That leaves the visits to SJP of Fulham, Boro and Pompey, and the trips to Stoke, Hull and Spurs. Six cup ties, eh? (Shame we were garbage in the cups this year too.) Probably at least 12 more points needed - maybe a couple less but you wouldn't count on it. It's bad. But then you have to say that if there aren't 3 or 4 wins left in this team from those fixtures, then Division 2 is indeed their rightful home.

Margaret: Only a Grocer's Daughter?

I've just been watching BBC2's Margaret: 110 minutes of prime-time drama, and what one imagines (and the BBC presumably hopes) is still considered to be 'talk-about' television. Certainly they're talking about it on Newsnight as I write - Étonnant, non? - but the minute I saw the rogue's gallery of a panel they'd invited (Hattersley! David Steel! Jonathan Aitken!) I couldn't find the off-button fast enough, albeit sadly not before they led off with Hattersley, spluttering his usual sanctimonious rheumy-eyed rubbish.

I felt that Margaret was well-written, boldly structured, very well cast and played across the board, and directed with plentiful verve and imagination, if also a few inevitably ponderous strokes. Still, something's bugging me - perhaps on the back of Tony Saint's also very smart and amusing film of last year about Thatcher's early rise, The Long Walk to Finchley, from the same production company as Margaret.

Simply put, in treating politics contemporary dramatists seem unable to look past the gleeful backstage elements of the Rise to Power & the Fall from Grace: in Thatcher's case they have Alan Clark's celebrated Diaries to give them most of the aces on the latter score, and they seem to feel her gender then provides all the novelty required to make these old planks solid underfoot. Sure, Margaret was very good at evoking the bitterness of Thatcher's unseating of Heath; the clearly insecure stridency of her first term of office that could even have been her last had it not been for Galtieri; and a sort of clammy revenge of the emasculated among her last cabinet circa November 1990. I think R.W. Johnson summarised it best in the London Review of Books while reviewing Major's and Lamont's memoirs:

"[N]either account gives us the rich cheesiness of the truth... By 1987, when the Leaderene had won her third straight election, the Cabinet was stacked with rabbits, nerds and characters with sufficiently low testosterone levels to endure repeated handbagging. Crucially, when Thatcher announced that she was going to take advantage of her victory to bring in the poll tax – which no one else much believed in or liked – they simply nodded it through... the full lunacy of the thing was clear to all save Thatcher. A major recession had begun, unemployment was rising sharply, inflation was 8 per cent and going up, and the bank rate had been raised to 15 per cent in a desperate attempt to shore up the pound, which had fallen badly as the huge payments deficits caused by Lawson’s boom reached unsustainable levels. When the boom collapsed, producing a house price implosion and the misery of negative equity, the nemesis of Thatcherite economic policy was evident to one and all. The result was political catastrophe... Most remarkable of all, the electorate, which in January 1990 had said by a margin of 50 to 36 that they expected the Tories to win the next election, had by April swung to a 56-23 majority prophesying a Labour victory... Thatcher was on the ropes and it was entirely her own fault."

How did it come to that? What was the driving force that carried three general elections, only to fall to pieces so completely? Why was Thatcher such a divisive figure, to the degree that if you revisit the 'good' British drama made during her time in office you find a blinding torrent of furious polemics against her, and nothing in her favour other than by the proxy of 'mainstream entertainment'? Maybe the novelty has waned since we who witnessed Thatcher's ousting have since seen another three-time pollwinner PM ditched by their own Party.

In focusing on Thatcher's private neurosis and the psychodrama of that cabinet, the frenzied air of betrayal, the sniping personal relations, the antagonism of the sexes and the hidden injuries of sexism... I felt Margaret was a fine effort that also took the road of least resistance. No single drama can cover all the bases, not least of a life such as Thatcher's. But I wonder still - with all this revisionist stuff afoot, and so much Proustian/Freudian revisiting of the political flashpoints of the period - is there not room for a dramatic study of what Thatcher actually did with power, or the true ramifications of same that we live with today? Rich pickings there, no question.

A Fool and a Knave

I believe we have the Financial Times to thank for the image to my left, forwarded me by a friend earlier today. Of course - as more than one cornered and humiliated weasel of a banker has bleated before a Commons Select Committee of late - no single individual could and should bear the entire blame for the blazing catastrophe we're all currently living through. Sadly, more of us have helped to stoke the fires in our own meagre fashion than we'd like to think - so-called good men doing nothing.
But, to be fair, generally, we had our own jobs and businesses to attend to; and I reckon if we'd had 250-year-old banks to run, then I think most of us would have managed not to run them into ruination, spending and loaning money that wasn't ours, pursuing vainglorious visions of endless growth built on imaginary foundations.
Moreover: the public has need of an embodiment of the third-rate evil besetting us - a pig's head on a stick, to pelt with calumny. And sometimes there is an individual at hand who happens to fit the bill handsomely - a fat pig of really gruesome proportions.
One has to observe that the ostensibly non-porcine qualities for which Fred Goodwin was (briefly) admired, and possibly even liked - coldness, self-assurance, contempt for those beneath him - were on display for all to see in today's letter to Lord Myners (and the blogger Guido Fawkes appears to have a vicarious admiration for selfsame traits.) In the face of such a performance, on some level one has to say 'Bravo.' But I don't think this show is over yet.

Hercules Bellville 1939-2009

'That's a hell of a name. You got to live up to it, boy...'

Yes, Tough Guys Don't Dance again, but the usefulness and all-round sapience of that text is proven to me once more when I think about the sad passing of the superb (and superbly named) Hercules Bellville, who died last week. One might describe him as an International Man of Mystery, though this would be to miss his humour, and his candour, and the fact that when he was around he was so very present. But if you look for him on Google you won't find much to pin on his name, other than a list of glorious movie titles. I would like to have a picture of him here by this screed, looking like a Roman senator, but instead we must make do with something related to a picture he once made with his friend Roman...

I received the news of Hercules' death from a friend on the weekend, and was so able to enjoy Chris Auty's obituary in the Guardian as what I assume will be the first of many rich and splendid tributes to this marvellous man - rather than being stunned and upset by it as 'news'. In fact, I was able to be of some small service to Auty's writing inasmuch as I still have by my desk the weathered paperback of Roman By Polanski that I purchased back in 1985, and so was able to source Polanski's recorded remembrance of first meeting "a thin, gangling young man in a brown velvet jacket and bright pink tie ... very keen to break into filmmaking." This was Hercules, on the eve of the shooting of Repulsion, and his 'long, bony, elegant fingers' would be immortalised, uncredited, in one of the film's creepiest moments.

Perhaps because Hercules was Hercules, I had this info about him logged in my mental computer when I eventually had the good luck to make his acquaintance, at some point earlier this decade. My immediate impression was much the same as everybody else's - that here was a man of highly refined qualities, who knew an inordinate number of things, yet wouldn't be making a fuss about it. In terms of the intricacy of his vital relationships with some of the great filmmakers of our time, where to start unpicking the threads?

I can't say I knew Hercules well at all and yet he showed me the most extraordinary acts of kindness while I was at work on my book with Sean Penn, giving me bona fides and 'letters of introduction' that led to my sitting down in Los Angeles with Jack Nicholson (in his Mulholland Drive eyrie) and (separately...) with Anjelica Huston. I've no doubt that the consideration shown to me by both Nicholson and Huston on those occasions was on account of their doing a favour for their friend; and indeed, as an aside or prelude to the main business, both were very keen to share with me a few fond tales of Brave Hercules...

On the Penn project Hercules also, without fuss, put me together with Bob Rafelson and James Foley, meetings that meant a great deal to me. When subsequently I tried to thank 'Herky' (as I never presumed to call him), his response was a gruff, instinctively gracious, 'Oh, not at all, we all have to help each other out...' And so I assume someone must have helped him too, way back when - or else, he just had these gifts of good fellowship installed in his character from birth.

The last time I saw him was maybe late 2007, in a meeting at Recorded Picture Company, ostensibly about a screenplay of mine that had been doing the rounds, though I soon realised Hercules had really come to sit in with his 'development' colleague primarily in order to rag me about what he reckoned to be a highly unsuitable cover that Faber and Faber had stuck on a book I had edited, authored by another of Hercules' many good friends. His taste was so impeccable that I couldn't quarrel - it was just much more endearing that he felt the point of principle ought to be made, in the spirit of friendship, and of aesthetics. Those gifts of his again... which he clearly exercised daily, and which a great many people will be sorely missing as of now and henceforth. I trust there will be a tremendous party thrown in his honour sometime soon, and I imagine the list of attendees will be luminous.

Sean Penn, Best Actor, 'Milk': Nobody Does It Better

Newcastle 0 Everton 0: Tin Hats Time

If I were an Everton fan tonight I could still be feeling a bit warm 'n' fuzzy about the world and my team's place in it - this in spite of what I might think were two points dropped at Newcastle, plus worrying injuries picked up by the squad's best player Arteta as well as the lad Anichebe.
But where, you ask, would a Hypothetical Toffee like me find such solace? Why, by sitting down to watch BBC2's Match of the Day 2, and picking up on the tender vibes of consensual concern emanating off the sofa from The Host and His Guest Pundits - a rueful concern for my team's general misfortune on the day, but also a more hopeful consideration of the young lads in the first XI who are coming through and showing promise nonetheless... Yep, I would definitely feel that Someone Cared.
And as for that shower of risible scum up in Newcastle, who were vaguely involved on the cusp of today's contest as the Opposition? Well, that radgy thug of theirs who fettled Anichebe got his wholly deserved censure both from the ref and the MOTD2 sofa, and then... well, that must have been the only thing of note the hapless/witless Geordie muppets did for 90-odd minutes, because nothing else was deemed worthy of comment during the post-highlights guff by either the two aged ex-Arsenal defenders or that talent-free '100% Baggies' fan who looks like a pork pie - though in his particular case the less said is always much the better.
Still, I think I glimpsed Steve Harper make a good save, and Ryan Taylor looked lively, plus there was nice work by Martins late on to give Jonas a chance, and Duff, Nolan and Lovenkrands combined well to make the best chance of the day...
Hard to quarrel with a point, might have taken that before proceedings got under way. They were well on top for a good long while. But then they ran out of ideas, and if Kevin Nolan hadn't then covered himself in shame we might have given it a fair crack of a whip. Instead it was all tin hats for 45 minutes. Might as well keep them on for the run of games ahead...

James Bradley on Mad Men & Big Novels

Further to recent remarks I've been pleased to learn that James Bradley (pictured) lately wrote an excellent piece for the Australian ('The idiot box grows a brain') about long-form narrative in television drama series and in the novel - occasioned, I suppose, by some much-praised recent instances of the former:

"Mad Men, made by American cable network AMC, is only one of a growing catalogue of ambitious [TV] programs distinguished by not just by their complexity and intelligence but by their urgent engagement with the world we inhabit. Taken collectively these shows, this new television, constitute nothing less than a revolution, a revolution that has transformed series television, late in life and perhaps improbably, into our most vital cultural form... No longer tidy, predictable, generic, at its best the new television commands the richness and breadth of vision that was once the sole preserve of the novel."

James also summons The Sopranos and The Wire to his argument:

"Indeed, in the ambition, complexity and detail of its depiction of the corruption of Baltimore's public institutions, The Wire quite deliberately (and sometimes a little too self-consciously) has in its sights the great social novels of the 19th century and their ambition to represent the whole of society from top to bottom and, more importantly, to tease out the way the destinies of the greatest were intimately connected to the fates of the most insignificant. The novel abandoned this ambition some time ago. Although the English still dabble in the great social novel - Richard Kelly's Crusaders and Phillip Hensher's Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency are recent examples...'

I might say that it's a fine thing to be cited in such a debate and in such a manner. But the case James makes for the New Television is very compelling and, in a highly well-minted way, expresses a lot of what I've heard anecdotally from quite a few other informed observers. It does make me worry for the poor old novel, though. As James puts it:

"Some critics - see Zadie Smith's New York Review of Books piece on Joseph O'Neill's Booker-shortlisted novel Netherland - argue that the novel, or at least the realist literary novel, has reached some kind of logical end point, its polite but reflexive aestheticising now an end in itself, unable by its very nature to engage with the world as it is."

Clearly, then, it's counter-revolution time. More long novels, comrades! And make 'em as radical as reality itself, to steal the words of Lenin from before he got on the train.

Mailer, Freud, Blair/Brown, Philip Collins: Coincidence? I think not

'Coincidence, what do you make of it?' So Tim Madden asks his father Dougy in Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance (a book, you may have guessed, that is rarely far from my thoughts.) In fact, Tim already has a theory on the matter:

'I believe we receive traces of everyone's thoughts... I think when something big and unexpected is about to happen, people come out of their daily static. Their thoughts start pulling toward one another. It's as if an impending event creates a vacuum, and we start to go toward it. Startling coincidences pile up at a crazy rate...'

Freud didn't buy coincidence, no sir, but Jung did. Freud thought there was a causal explanation for dual manifestations that we would otherwise see as uncanny: basically a repetition of old mental habits congealed around buried traumas, familiar repressions, always wearily likely to resurface. But Jung defied his former master, arguing that coincidence, 'syncronicity', pointed toward something meaningful - 'big and unexpected', even.

Now, it is no coincidence whatsoever - in fact, a matter of hard causation - when the scholarly think-tanker Philip Collins (pictured), a former habitue of Tony Blair's Downing Street, writes an op-ed piece in the Times strongly critical of Gordon Brown's goverment, and a rash of media comment on said piece breaks out. The Evening Standard reports said piece as news. The Spectator nods its head fiercely in agreement with Collins. For The Independent Jon Cruddas MP rates the Collins critique as a worrying recurrence of scarlet Blairism, never quite brought under control or inoculated against.

What is the substance of said critique? Collins argues that Brown is a creature of obsessive manouevring and positioning rather than of any fixed and worthwhile principle: in short, that he would never espouse 'equality', say, because it's 'good' or 'right' but because it's 'politically useful', and that he thinks of 'crime' as 'a political event rather than an infringement of liberty.' (So much, then, for all that supposed 'integrity' Brown used to wear as lightly as sainthood.) And as a consequence of this obsessive tendency, in light of recent events, Collins believes that "Labour now finds itself just to the left of sensible on everything."

It's scarcely a coincidence of note, given my recent musings, that I should seize on the sight of Philip Collins leaning heavily for his analogy upon the general incorrectness of Freudian theory, which he does like so:

'The strain of repressing the traumatic past - devalued currency, winter of discontent, public spending run riot, the regulatory regime of 1997 - and the task of displacing the present - “it all started in America” - is exhausting [the Brown government's] capacity to act. The only response is a series of dreams as wish-fulfilment - the Prime Minister will become the international sultan of regulation, the economic news will be good by the end of the year. The truth is that Labour was never going to win on the economy. It was just a daydream, on Freud's definition, in which the hero wins out and achieves his heart's desire...'

An instance of the sadness as Collins sees it is that Labour under Brown has 'bogged itself down in guidelines for rhubarb crumble recipes and instructions for playgrounds to be painted' rather than bolder strokes for improving schools. (He invokes the name of the Department for Children, Schools and Families rather as a sort of Grey Lubyanka.) But of what measures would Collins himself approve, were he nearer to the levers? He thinks Michael Gove’s plans to 'free schools from the control of local authorities' are the right idea, because Labour could and should have done it already. More generally he's on the side of 'plans to improve literacy... transfer power to local authorities...reform of policing', all of which seem to his eye to be written off or forgotten. In brief, the small-c-conservative, liberal, pragmatic New Labour project has been spitefully abandoned, and the excuse of the international banking fiasco is no sort of a fig-leaf.

You can sense Collins' special concern over the notion that Labour has wound up chasing the Tories' lead just like an opposition party. For wasn't Blairism about making Labour the natural party of government? It seemed to me at the time that this was attempted mainly by outflanking the Conservatives, triangulating them in Clintonian fashion by adopting any elements of populist good sense that the Opposition managed to display. Has Cameron now triangulated the Blair Project? Collins seems to think he's seized the opportunity:
"[Cameron] says that he wants to give people the power to instigate referendums on, for example, council tax increases. He wants to change the assumption that local authorities should have to beg Whitehall for permission to act. He wants a referendum on elected mayors in the big cities. An imaginative Labour party should be exploring all these ideas."

Too much in there to quibble with, other than to say I'm not much interested in either of those referenda and I don't know enough about how local government does or doesn't work in the shadow of Whitehall. But I'll look forward to the next column on the subject, and finish instead on this business of coincidence. I happen to know Philip Collins a little bit through a mutual friend, just as his predecessor in the post of Blair's chief speechwriter, Peter Hyman, was once my editor at a student newspaper. Coincidentally I ran into Philip late last year at the same hotel to which we'd taken our respective families for a 'weekend break' (though Philip had his laptop with him, such was the workload...) As for Peter, I routinely see him pushing his kids on the swings at the same municipal park to which I take my little girl.

After 10 years of Blair's premiership I daresay we all felt to some extent that we could ventriloquise him a bit, 'do Blair'. I certainly tried my hand at same in Crusaders. Maybe I felt myself sufficiently qualified for such mimicry on account of having spent some time in the company of a couple of the fellows who best received the traces of Tony's thoughts (a la Mailer)and so could put well-minted words directly into his mouth?

James Bradley's City of Tongues

One of Faber and Faber's biggest and happiest successes of recent years has been James Bradley's novel The Resurrectionist. Though James and I haven't (yet) met, I would presume that we share not just a publisher but also a few aspects of a certain sort of nineteenth-century mindset... At his website City of Tongues he curates links to some terrific material pertaining both to The Resurrectionist and to his other novels and assorted writings, as well as blogging on various matters of a literary bent - and the other day he was kind enough to pay compliments both to Crusaders and to this blog, which I am hereby happy to repay.
I'm also pleased to note that, while a number of Australian writers and readers have now gone online with the view that Crusaders wasn't much noticed on its publication in Australia, these selfsame correspondents have more than fulfilled my own hopes in that regard, just in terms of the generosity of their particular responses to the book.

Crusaders and the Exotic North East

The website of the non-fiction-specialising literary agency Andrew Lownie seems to like to run occasional vox-pop commentaries on the state of UK publishing, and this month they've invited a number of editors to prognosticate about what sort of books might work in the trade during 2009. The results are interesting, and reflect an increasingly familiar debate about whether Realism or Escapism is the dominant cultural/creative response to Hard Times. Some believe we will all want to get serious and austere now, to rediscover lost values, tool ourselves up for possible future hardship, and ensure that we are never fooled again. Others are quite sure we will all continue to dodge the dreary stuff and cling on to our natural capacity for foolishness...
And where does your correspondent come into any of this? Well, by way of the following contribution from Sarah Norman, editor at Atlantic Books, shortly after she has considered a few of the Escapist options and expressed high hopes for a forthcoming and seemingly fantastical Atlantic novel entitled Girl with Glass Feet:

"For the past few years the public have also been embracing some significant new literary voices from around the world, but I wonder whether the success of novels like Ross Raisin's God's Own Country and Richard T. Kelly's Crusaders – in which the regional British setting is so integral to the narrative – are a sign that we're beginning to find what's closer to home exotic and intriguing again."

Well, if so, then that would seem to chime with Stuart Evers' observations on the Guardian Book Blog as mentioned below. In truth, I am perhaps a tad fortunate if Crusaders is rated a 'success' in the company of Ross Raisin's acclaimed debut novel, for which, if I heard right, he was paid a six-figure advance by the publisher, and duly went on to earn them and himself a couple of highly rated literary prizes as well as a few other nominations. I can claim no such distinctions but, still, if anybody reckons I fit this particular cap (if only for the purpose of debate) then for sure I will wear it, for sure and no worries...

Crusaders, The Guardian Book Blog, and the Devouring Vastness of America

An interesting piece on the Guardian Book Blog yesterday by Stuart Evers, on the subject of the common preference of young-ish English readers for fiction written in American... Testing out his own preferences and prejudices, Evers plays an amusing game of compare-and-contrast with two English sentences, to wit:

1. Mary fills up at the gas station, then drives her Chevy Impala to Roy's Diner.
2. Mary fills up at the petrol station, then drives her Nissan Micra to Roy's Rolls.

Indeed, one has rather more dynamism than the other, somehow... But a lot of that is to do with the particular American romance of The Road. I remember at least two fine books that I bought as a young man mainly on the strength of their automotive cover imagery (and, ok, the glowing review quotes appended to said covers), namely Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays and William Least-Heat-Moon's Blue Highways. (Didion's protagonist always pumped her own gas, just like Evers' 'Mary'...)

Evers also cites yours truly in a kindly fashion near the end of his piece, sticking up for the writing of these isles:

"When I asked Richard T Kelly – whose debut novel, Crusaders, was one of last year's highlights from either side of the Atlantic – about British writers' and critics' relationship with American fiction, he suggested that the days of looking enviously over the pond were coming to an end."

Indeed, I remember saying this to Stuart when I met him after the Writloud event at RADA last summer. Because, as I recall, there were quite a few big novels in English about England last year, and they mostly seemed to get serious consideration and marks for ambition. Meanwhile, the typically near-cuboid size of the so-called Major American Novel has perhaps become a rather self-conscious business over the last 10 or 12 years. I'm all for Moby Dick, for U.S.A., for Harlot's Ghost, which is to set the bar a little high perhaps, but if it's a compendious novel then I expect an expansive subject matter to boot.

Dreaming is Free, mercifully, as I'm not sure I'd pay for it

'All that we see or seem', wrote Poe, 'Is but a dream within a dream.' Nope, you were wrong there, Edgar. Go easy on that laudanum. The hard-edged contours of our daily life may occasionally get a little blurry before our waking eyes, but rarely ever so warped as the stuff we see and seem while we're asleep. (Funnily enough Poe's poem was turned into a pop song by Propaganda, a band I liked a great deal back in 1985. And while tuning into the first couple reels of John Carpenter's The Fog on ITV4 the other night - something I must have done a million times - I realised I'd forgotten that Carpenter took the line cited above as his film's fancy epigraph.)

While I'm being scholastic, may we then contend that 'A dream is a wish your heart makes / When you're fast asleep?' I ask only because this Hal David tune is strongly featured in Disney's Cinderella, which I must have sat and watched with my daughter about a million times in the last week alone. But no, I have to be a blasted pedant and observe that when Cinders sings about 'a dream' she is referring in fact to what Dr Freud called a 'phantasy': a neurotic daydreaming or, if we are more generous, the imaginative activity that underlies all waking thought and feeling.

All this occurs to me because earlier this week I woke, rather troubled, from a dream in which I met someone I hadn't seen for maybe 15 years, the setting being a place much like that in which we last met, the person physically unchanged by the passage of those 15 years - and yet I in this dream was much the same person I am today, fully aged and weathered by said interim. It certainly wasn't the sort of encounter I would have bothered to daydream about, nor did it much resemble those that I have on a daily basis. Therefore I would venture that however one would best define it, pace Poe and Cinderella, would be the definition of what a dream is.

Thinking about the great enemies of Freud in our time puts me in mind of Vladimir Nabokov, whose writing I used to love. Apparently he explained his disdain to one interviewer like so: 'I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me... I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books.'

There's a bit in Transparent Things which, I think, suggests that Nabokov thought himself much too good for the sort of dreams Freud discussed... That said, I don't think I have 'those' dreams either. And yet, still, I feel 'the Viennese Quack' was onto something.
(That Nabokov's other great professed hate was Dostoyevsky is the decisive reason why I finally stopped reading VN's stuff. Because what could one think but 'Get over yourself, man'?)

WBA 2 Newcastle 3: Late Breaking News - P. Lovenkrands also Geordie...

I lived through a predictable range of emotions on Saturday afternoon, with the radio on and off while I was 'working'. It has been known for Newcastle to race into early leads, just as they find it easy to lose them, but a 3-1 first-half advantage, with a goal for new boy Lovenkrands and a couple of assists from new lad Ryan Taylor, was obviously a big boon. By the middle of the second half, and Albion's inevitable halving of the deficit leading to sphincter-tightening Final Stages, a lot had become clearer about the earlier skirmishes - namely that WBA were managing to defend even worse than us, and that our counterattacking game was not at its sharpest given the frontline resources at Chris Hughton's disposal.

Still, this is what the Toon will need to do more of if they're to survive - win games away from home against sides who are not significantly better than us, or else hardly much worse.

In general when seeking football wisdom, I only read NUFC blogs and fansites, of course - no other clubs' banter or bile concerns me. But I did stumble across a funny Baggies blog after the game, the author of which claimed to have been on the same post-match 'plane home' as Damian Duff. According to said author, Duff's considered view was that West Brom were 'sh*te', but when asked Duffer couldn't venture a specific opinion on the opposition player deployed to mark him that afternoon, because he'd never noticed the guy... Ought to be true, even if by any chance it's not.