Reading 2024: Yesterday's Spy by Len Deighton

Told in the first person, this is a plunge into a world peopled by men equipped with gold Dunhill lighters who bonded through sharing danger in the Second World War and whose main approach to coping with what they remember is to drink large amounts without ever getting properly drunk. 

It opens in White's, the very grandest of the St James's Street clubs. Someone I used to know joined White's and Brooks's and, realising that the latter was a nicer place by far, inquired at White's how he could resign his membership. His question was met with utter perplexity: "Sir, no one has ever requested such a thing before."

Anyway, that is pretty much the last glimpse we get of English high society - and puzzlingly the character who is supposedly a member of White's is more Arab than English anyway. 

Speaking of things Arab, the plot turns out to be surprisingly contemporary - with both Russians and Arabs implicated in a dangerous plot against the west. As regards the latter of the two aggressors, one character observes that everyone knows what the novel's villain "is up to: he's an Arab." "And you?" comes the response. "I'm a Jew, simple as that", is the reply. The same character later observes "Helping the Israelis might be the West's only chance to survive". I suspect this may still be true today, although I recognise this is contested ground and have no intention of engaging in any arguments on the subject.

It is eventually discovered that the dirty work to get the planned attack on the west off the ground has been performed in secret in France by people "from all the Arab states, brought in as waiters and labourers, foundry workers and garbage men...the French immigration can't stop them." Immigration authorities worldwide seems to have caught the virus of impotence since then. Perhaps it originated with the French - who knows.

Anyway, lo and behold, what a shock, our narrator narrowly foils the dastardly plot, after some rather John Steed/Avengers plot twists. All eventually ends reasonably well - as well as it can in a disenchanted post-war world. 

The whole thing took only a few hours to read and is therefore a proper airport book - in the sense that if you got stuck, as sadly does happen too often, for hours in an airport, it would entertain you for several hours. 

Incidentally, one aspect of the novel that I hadn't expected, and that enhances its escapist atmosphere, is Deighton's fondness for describing men's clothing. One character has "a beautifully cut chalk-stripe suit", another wears "chalk-stripe worsted" and "hand-made shoes", a third, bizarrely, sports "a short fur coat and a black kerchief knotted cowboy-style, right against the throat", while a fourth, a rather tough German policeman, is seen straightening "the shoulder strap of his impeccable white trench coat". I seem to remember that a dark grey pure silk trench coat also makes an appearance. 

Not many hand-made shoes or chalk-stripe worsteds were in evidence at Luton airport last time I was there. Perhaps things have improved since. If not, Deighton would provide not only diversion but a sartorial refuge while stuck waiting for a cheap flight.

Reading 2024: The Afterlife and Other Stories by John Updike

I wonder if John Updike would be published, were he starting out now. On the basis of one short story and a bit of one of his novels, this reader believes he's worth ditching from the canon on the charge of misogyny - and there are plenty of others who have appeared over the last decade or so as witnesses for the prosecution in that regard.

Finding women so attractive that you keep being unfaithful to other women - as Updike seems to have done a lot in his early adulthood ("I was a passionate creature in those years, with surges of desire shaking my bones" one of his elderly characters in this collection observes, looking back at his younger self) - is, I suppose, a kind of misogyny, although not a straightforward one. Whatever kind it is or isn't, I don't think it makes any difference to whether Updike's writing is bad or good - but I don't read fiction in order to think, "Hurray, this writer thinks exactly like me".

What I read Updike for is his wonderfully meticulous descriptions, the notice he takes and the care he then goes to in order to create for his readers a small world, a few characters. If all the photographs of the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties are digitised and then vanish due to digital wastage or a permanent outage of electricity, we will still be able to find, in Updike's evocations of the America he lived in, perfect snapshots of that part of our past.

The Afterlife and Other Stories is a collection that seems to have been written when Updike was beginning to feel "the ineluctable logic of decay tightening its grip on his body", so that "the headlines in the paper ... seemed directed at somebody else, like the new movies and television specials and pennant races and beer commercials - somebody younger and more easily excited, somebody for whom the world still had weight". The stories mainly concern middle class people in the middle of their lives. Some are still married, some newly divorced, some alone, some in uncomfortable second marriages. Most of the protagonists are increasingly aware that death is approaching. 

A recurring theme is a complicated relationship with a mother who remains a difficult, yet intimately connected, figure, a woman who irritates but can share with the protagonist, "the vanished texture of the world she had brought him to life within, a world of glamorous drugstores, with marble counter tops, and movie houses that were exotic islands of air-conditioning, with paper icicles dripping from the marquee," or who, if she has already died, has left her son "the sole custodian of hundreds of small mental pictures...of a specialised semiotics, a thousand tiny nuanced understandings of her, a once commonplace language of which he was now the surviving speaker." 

The stories tell of the awkwardness of visiting neighbourhood friends who have reinvented themselves elsewhere, of the uncomfortable intimacy of ill-matched couples holidaying far from home without children or other people, of a mother's obsession with a farmhouse, of the rise and fall of a community recorder orchestra and various other things. Mostly they are mesmerising in the clarity of their description and the attention Updike pays to the protagonists and their mysteriously shifting moods. Interspersed through the book are some lighter pieces, most notably one about a Scottish caddy, which beguiled me, even though when I began it I fretted, because I wanted more of the usual quiet insight I'd come to expect.

I am reading a lot of Updike at the moment. In another book, he talks of his jet-lagged insomnia during a trip to Finland. In this collection, in a story called Falling Asleep Up North, he provides one of the most accurate descriptions of insomnia I've ever come across. Reading it as an insomniac, I was grateful to discover that I am not isolated in my, until now rather lonely, inability to sleep:

"Falling asleep has never struck me as a very natural thing to do. There is a surreal trickiness to traversing that in-between area, when the grip of consciousness is slipping but has not quite let go and curious mutated thoughts pass as normal cogitation unless snapped into clear light by a creaking door, one's bed partner twitching, or the prematurely jubilant realisation I'm falling asleep.  The little fumbling larvae of nonsense that precede dreams' uninhibited butterflies are disastrously exposed to a light they cannot survive and one must begin again, relaxing the mind into unravelling. Consciousness of the process balks it; the brain, watching itself, will not close its thousand eyes. Circling in the cell of wakefulness, it panics at the poverty of its domain - these worn-out obsessions, these threadbare word-games, these pointless grievances, these picayune plans for tomorrow, which yet loom, hours from execution, as unbearably momentous."

For me, reading Updike is like being with a companion who describes what he sees and feels with such care and precision that I am able to pay more attention to my own surroundings and to see more sharply and perhaps with greater wisdom what being a human is. His work is reassuring and also inspiring - his close observation of life and his subsequent ability to turn what he has observed into sentences full of bright, clearcut images deserves nothing but praise.

 

Virtue Signalling

In the district of Budapest variously called the party district, the Jewish quarter and district VII,  this mural appeared in 2022. 

It was commissioned by the United Nations (your taxes at work) and shows a refugee, a dove at her left shoulder, two children in tow.

What I find nauseating about it is how insulting it is to the actual refugee from whom it takes its inspiration:

Why does the woman in the mural not look like an actual woman under great duress, but instead resemble a catwalk model? Is the implication that refugees must not only be desperate but also fulfil the requirements of the fashion and beauty world's adjudicators?

More importantly, why is the UNHCR wasting money on this kind of thing? If you donated to them, would you expect them to use your cash for propaganda?
 

PS How interesting - I just walked past and saw that the explanatory plaque which showed the original photograph on which the mural was based has now been taken down. 

The Draft Horse by Robert Frost

 I came across this poem for the first time yesterday:

THE DRAFT HORSE by Robert Frost

With a lantern that wouldn't burn 
In too frail a buggy we drove 
Behind too heavy a horse 
Through a pitch-dark limitless grove. 

And a man came out of the trees 
And took our horse by the head 
And reaching back to his ribs 
Deliberately stabbed him dead. 

The ponderous beast went down 
With a crack of a broken shaft. 
And the night drew through the trees 
In one long invidious draft. 

The most unquestioning pair 
That ever accepted fate 
And the least disposed to ascribe 
Any more than we had to to hate,

We assumed that the man himself 
Or someone he had to obey 
Wanted us to get down 
And walk the rest of the way.

Here there is an article about the poem that goes on too long but begins with some interesting observations. There is another here and another here. I haven’t read those last two, but I am intrigued to do so as I am curious about other readers’ reactions to the poem’s mystery.

An Intergalactic Conversation

 I was sent a link to this strange and very short radio play.. I don’t know who wrote it but it mildly amuses me so I’m putting it here in case it might amuse anyone else:

They’re Made Out of Meat

“ They're made out of meat."

  "Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

  "Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

  "That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

  "So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

  "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."

  "Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."

"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?"

  "Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."

"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."

  "No brain?"

"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"

  "So... what does the thinking?"

"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."

  "Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"

  "Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."

  "So what does the meat have in mind."

"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."

  "We're supposed to talk to meat?"

"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."

  "They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"

"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."

  "I thought you just told me they used radio."

"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

  "Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"

"Officially or unofficially?"

  "Both."

"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."

  "I was hoping you would say that."

"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"

  "I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say?" `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"

"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."

  "So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."

"That's it."

  "Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?"

"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."

  "A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."

"And we can marked this sector unoccupied."

Reading 2024 - The Hardest Problem by Rupert Shortt

I believe, sometimes with more or less difficulty, in Catholic Christianity. I understand that part of my obligation as a Catholic is to explain why I am a Catholic, in the hope others may join the faith. Yet I have to admit that I do not find faith explicable in a simple way. It is for me a mysterious response to mystery. I recognise that, especially now, in this age of technology, believing in something called God seems preposterous, let alone the idea that the being we call God decided to bring into the world via virgin birth an incarnation of himself whom he then allowed humanity to kill - and as for the proposition that whenever I go to mass I am spiritually renewed by eating a wafer that is Christ trans-substantiated, I am left only with the statement that that is what I believe, ever more so as I experience the certainty that consumption of the sacrament makes me a (slightly) better person. 

The one faintly rational argument I have ever come up with is that the Christian doctrine of love and self denial demonstrates such an accurate understanding of what humans are bad at and need to be good at that I can't help feeling only a greater power could have constructed it. Jesus's Lord's Prayer seems to me a similarly miraculously clear articulation of an entire religion, suggesting to me it was not formulated by a mere human. 

All this is not enough to make me confident to try to persuade, especially as I am possibly one of the least persuasive people around on any subject. I rarely lay out an argument succinctly or with clarity, and my fondness for meandering off point is a major fault. 

Thus, I decided to read The Hardest Problem by Rupert Shortt. I hoped to arm myself with excellent arguments for faith, in the face of the sometimes scornful disbelief of most people I encounter.

The book begins with Shortt quoting David Hume: 

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

My immediate thought on reading this was that Hume has not defined evil. Shortt does not go on to do so either, but simply remarks that people of faith should be chastened by Hume's remarks. He then quotes a scientist, Freeman Dyson, who says: 

"to worship God means to recognise that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether passes our comprehension."  

Shortt concludes from that that: 

"we should move through the world in somewhat the same way as we move about in someone else's home, noticing that we are the guests and someone else is the host."  

He goes on to suggest that a specifically Christian framework regards self-sacrificial love as necessary for happiness, so that "service is perfect freedom" and "endurance is a spur to salvation in a longer perspective." 

Shortt goes on to look at Hobbes and his misuse by Richard Dawkins, at Jonathan Sacks on Auschwitz (he said God was there "in the words 'Thou shalt not murder'"), at Joseph Ratzinger, at the actor Matthew MacConaughey and at a journalist called James Marriott, before arriving at Schopenhauer who, Shortt tells us:

"is only one of a posse of major philosophers to have seen as clearly as any theologian that a grown up life necessarily involves struggle softened by periods of contentment." 

Shortt then quotes Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who said: 

"The world is an immense groping, an immense search...It can only progress at the cost of many failures and many casualties."

Shortt passes on to cosmological arguments - as he describes them, "a recognition that it is not possible in the terms naturalism allows to say how anything at all can exist." 

He cites a physicist called Peter Hodgson, who wrote:

"Simple or complicated, small or large, the passage from non-existence to existence is the most radical of all steps...the transition from non-being to being is beyond the power of science to detect."

Shortt adds the observation of a philosopher called Denys Turner who wrote:

"'Nothing' has no process, no antecedent conditions, no random fluctuations in a vacuum, no explanatory law of emergence, and, there being nothing for 'something' to be 'out of', there can be no physics, not yet, for there is nothing yet for physics to get an explanatory grip on."

The mind-boggling mystery of existence versus non-existence is for me a compelling argument for a higher power than man, but it does not address Shortt's "hardest problem."

Nor, I think, does his next set of arguments - those for moral truths. He looks at the question of why most humans do have a sense of some things being morally right and some wrong, and points out that a creditable life can be led without religious convictions, but it is hard for an atheist to explain why a moral compass is not simply arbitrary. Shortt ends this section by in a sense returning to the cosmological, stating that "Abrahamic monotheism starts with the fundamental intuition that in the beginning God created."

The next section of the book is largely devoted to Iain McGilchrist's insights into left and right brain interaction, or lack thereof, and their relevance to religion. Shortt observes that: 

"One of the things good religion can do is remind us of how contentious it is to take for granted a model of human beings as greedy minds and wills roaming about a passive world in endless search of stuff to satisfy ourselves."

At last, Chapter 3 comes to the matter in hand, "God, Evil and Suffering". Aquinas scholar Timothy McDermott is quoted, Rowan Williams is quoted, CS Lewis's The Efficacy of Prayer is quoted. Shortt points out that while the Gospels (specifically Matthew 7:7, "Ask and it shall be given you") suggest that there is "a simple equation between faithful discipleship and the realisation of one's goals" the refusal of Jesus's prayers for deliverance in Gethsemane rather undermine that possibility. 

Shortt goes on to quote Herbert McCabe, David Bentley Hart, Eleonore Stump and various others, in an attempt to answer the question posed by Dostoevsky in Brothers Karamazov - is the unspeakably violent death of one small child justification for the saving of all humanity? He makes many good arguments but from my point of view as a would-be proselytiser most of them seem to be arguments that rest on a Christian faith. He says himself at one point that he is arguing "from a Christian standpoint", whereas what I had hoped for was an argument to persuade others who as yet don't see "from a Christian standpoint".

Perhaps that is impossible though. Perhaps the very first step in being a Christian is to give up trying to solve "the hardest problem", opting instead for a humble acceptance that humanity will never know why anything, including suffering, exists, because these things are beyond human comprehension. It is this acceptance that can bring an individual to the recognition that there is something greater in the universe than human ingenuity. 

But much of humanity - including extremely intelligent individuals - seems not to have noticed the impossibility of understanding either eternity or infinity, nor to have recognised that the very fact of existence is profoundly mysterious. Without perceiving those things - (and also without accepting - [reluctantly and with constant difficulty and effort, as it is very hard to repress one's own deep belief that the centre of everything is oneself and one's happiness] - that we need to desire what God has created us for, even though it may not include getting what we want) - it is hard (and probably to most people, seems unnecessary) to think about anything beyond oneself and the pain we suffer or see others suffering, apparently unfairly. 

However, by recognising the mysteriousness of existence itself, the strangeness of eternity and infinity, I think we can begin to understand how much we do not understand - and at that point faith, (most particularly the faith described by St Anselm - "I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe but I believe in order to understand") can enter. After that, it may be possible to recognise that the hardest problem is not suffering but learning the habit of self sacrifice. And that's where Christ comes in.

Reading 2024 - The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld

I admire Curtis Sittenfeld very much. I have not read her imagined tales of Laura Bush and Hilary Clinton and I probably won't, as I hate fiction into which real figures intrude (the big flaw of War and Peace, for me, is the appearance of Napoleon as a character within its pages).

What I have read by Sittenfeld is her novel Eligible,  an updating of Pride and Prejudice, which I really enjoyed - even couldn't put down, to be truthful. Purists hate that book, but I have always found Jane Austen unbearably waspish - never allowing a reader to intuit, always insisting on explaining who is absurd or irritating or silly - so anything written as a pastiche of her is not going to outrage me. Instead, I found Eligible clever and entertaining, and was amused by Sittenfeld's updating of some of the original's social dilemmas. I have also read several short stories by Sittenfeld and every one of them was both a pleasure to read and full of insight. Therefore, I was very happy to start 2024 with a novel by her

The Man of My Dreams tells the story of Hannah, who at the beginning of the novel is 14 or 15 and staying with her father's sister, as her family have been driven from their home by her father's temper. The novel follows the life of this lonely girl as she grows up, with little help or care from selfish parents, in a society that gives her the message that the most important thing for a young female is being able to attract young men and go to bed with them. 

Hannah does not fit the template of attractiveness necessary for this - or at least she believes she does not. She is also not at all sexually adventurous. She feels as if she is a misfit, although she is actually both wise and normal and probably far from alone, if only her contemporaries would be honest. 

I find Sittenfeld's writing so absorbing that I happily followed Hannah through almost 300 pages of not really getting what she has been taught to want and slowly learning that perhaps what she has been taught is wrong. I don't know how Sittenfeld does it but for me at least she is simply never boring. Perhaps one element of her charm is her truthfulness. An example of this is her description of teenage Hannah's reaction to being accosted by an older male stranger in the park. Instead of the simplicity of me-too outrage, Sittenfeld explains that Hannah felt "simultaneously alarmed, insulted and flattered."

I suppose I should register the suspicion that The Man of My Dreams might be of no interest to most male readers, chronicling as it does the coming of age of a young female. Although would anyone by the same token argue that Tom Jones would be of no interest to female readers?