Reading 2024 - Fantastic Invasion by Patrick Marnham

I chose Fantastic Invasion (the title comes from Conrad's Heart of Darkness) because it cost 20p and because it is about Africa and I am very interested in Africa but never want to go there. Patrick Marnham's reason for writing the book is to set out the thesis that Africa's problems all arise from the interference of "the North" in its affairs. The North is us. Marnham is convinced that trying to force our ways on Africans is a big mistake. 

To construct his interesting argument, Marnham tells all sorts of great stories, presents a both dispiriting and hilarious picture of what is really going on when game parks are set up and highlights many absurdities caused by outsiders thinking they know better than indigenous locals. He convincingly argues that the repeated Sehel disasters are the result of Westerners imposing their agricultural demands on lands that they don't understand - lands that had, until our arrival, been tended successfully by those who had lived on them for centuries. He conjures up the life of expatriates in the development industry, displaying considerable scepticism and scorn, with good reason I suspect. 

The book is now probably largely out of date in its details - although if you look up Sehel you will see that a lot of UN employment is being generated in trying to address the problems that Marnham argues were created by outsiders and can only be solved by leaving things in the hands of those who understand the area's environment because they are of the place. All the same there are things that leap out and make sense even today. 

Here, for example, are his remarks on refugees:

"African refugees have been presented as many things in [an] effort to avoid describing them as what they are. There is the refugee as 'a problem', an inexplicable abstract demanding general compassion. This is only briefly satisfactory, and the refugee is a persistent presence, so next we have the refugee as an idealist. In the words of the All-Africa Conference of Churches, refugees are 'people who somewhere, somehow, sometime had the courage to give up the feeling of belonging, which they possessed, rather than abandon the human freedom which they valued more highly'. This kind of analysis, 'somewhere, somehow, sometime', has a purpose: to prevent the exact consideration of particular refugees, here and now, and to forestall awkward questions as to 'how'.

Refugees are not just idealist; there is also the refugee as a sign of progress. 'The refugee is a by-product of the development of Africa. Refugees are therefore one aspect of the growing pains that Africa has to suffer before she attains the maturity that is essential to ensure freedom and equality of all races, tribes, creeds and the expression of controversial political opinions.' [Canon Burgess Carr, general secretary of the All-Africa Conference of Churches] This leads to the refugee as pioneer, not someone 'to be pitied, far more people to be admired'. And so, naturally, to the refugee as an opportunity, 'assets of the economic and social balance of the countries' development'. [UN High Commissioner for Refugees]. In fact, as elsewhere in the world, the refugee is nothing to do with pioneering or continental maturity or national development. If he is a sign of anything, he is a sign of national sickness. The refugee is the awkward evidence of Africa's inability and unwillingness to be reorganised into countries that have nothing to do with the real organisation of the people who live there.'

Everyone I have ever met who has had anything to do with Africa talks about tribalism, and Marnham is no exception:

"The obligations of African tribalism are honourable, and they are constantly honoured. They are an extension of the obligations of the family, and they are supported by customs and language to an extent that simply does not exist on a national scale. They have survived colonialism and independence and all the high hopes of an Africa of sovereign states. For Africans to deny tribal feeling or to indulge it covertly is for them to compromise their fundamental identity, that which they know intuitively, which governs much of their daily behaviour, and which unites people across the continent.

Marnham's arguments might sometimes be construed as racist, if suggesting that Africans and Europeans are profoundly and irrevocably different is racist (although to infer racism you would have to assume that in calling them different you thought one superior to the other as well). He says:

"For those members of the administrative class who are responsible for making things work ... there are certain refuges. One refuge is the theory of backwardness, the commonly held opinion that Africa is a 'backward' area which is 'progressing' (as opposed to a different society which is being forced to conform' ) and that African society is accomplishing in half a century - as it moves from tribalism to nationalism - what it took Europe a thousand years to achieve." 

adding: 

"Thanks to the system of nation-states, we see Africa more and more in our own likeness, as a primitive version of Europe which just needs time to catch up."

However, his central assertion is that all this is wrongheaded and in fact:

"Until Africa has achieved self-determination and stepped out of the colonial shadow which was cast at the time of independence, the real nations of Africa will never have a chance to develop. Until they do, the pseudo-nations that exist today will remain under the control of the powers that set them up and of the native rulers who act as their proxies. And the strain this causes to African society will continue to be felt by the citizens of these states, the mortal men of Africa."

I found this book really, really interesting, full of vivid anecdote and surprising perceptions. I would very much like to read an update that includes Marnham's thoughts on China's growing involvement in Africa and his predictions for how that new development might turn out.

A Question of Importance

Reading this very interesting article about WS Gilbert in Issue 33 of The Critic, I came across a list of ‘great British duos’. The writer argues that in all three examples - fish and chips; Morecambe and Wise; and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore - one half of the duo is 'vastly more important than the other'. 

I can see that Peter Cook was the genius in Cook and Moore, and the one with the glasses was funnier than the short one in Morecambe and Wise (although I never quite got the point of either of them, to be truthful - or possibly, in some circles, sacrilegious). 

The one pair in the list that I am not sure about is fish and chips - which is the most important element in that combination? Which part of the duo is the dominant one? I suppose it's chips, except that chips exist on their own. So is it actually battered fish? Do some people see the fish bit - or should that be 'the bit of fish'? - as the ascendant part of fish and chips, with chips a mere accompaniment? 

Actually I think the problem may be that this duo simply doesn't fit the thesis. I suspect for most people the two components of fish and chips stand together in importance. I wonder whether others agree.

I am also going to spend the rest of the day trying to think of other inseparable duos and working out whether any of them have a dominant and a recessive element. Antony and Cleopatra immediately spring to mind.

Reading 2024 - Stalled and Stubbed Out

 I went into a reading hiatus after: (a) getting becalmed in the middle of An Awkward Age by Henry James (I will go back to it, but I don't really read James for dialogue and quite frankly if anyone thinks Ivy Compton Burnett was an innovator in her dialogue-heavy approach to novel writing, An Awkward Age suggests to me that in fact she pinched the idea, lock, stock and barrel from Henry James); (b) beginning A Burnt Out Case by Graham Greene and then taking it out of the house to read in a train or a cafe and losing it and feeling cheated and bereft and unable to start any of the many other books around the house. 

Except for those that come under the heading 'detective fiction', of course. I could begin them with no trouble but for some reason I don't count reading detective fiction as real reading, even though I love reading detective fiction - or perhaps because I love reading detective fiction and therefore think it can't be worthwhile? 

Anyway, while I pined for A Burnt Out Case, I read detective fiction. Since about the age of 10, this is what I have done when discouraged. I started with Conan Doyle. Years later I discovered Margery Allingham. Dorothy L Sayers became another favourite. I don't read modern detective novels in which perversions are graphically described. I am reading for comfort and escape and horrible tales of flailing and other horrors just leave me disgusted. 

One author I love very much is Simenon, in his Maigret guise. The world he writes about - mostly Paris streets and bars and unglamorous dwellings - is so carefully observed and vivid and yet there is no showiness to his writing. In fact I realise as I write that what I especially like about the Maigret books is that I get a sense of quietness from them. While waiting for A Burnt Out Case to turn up again, I read La Première Enquête de Maigret and Maigret et le Corps sans Tête. In the course of reading them, I was baffled by a conversation with a friend I studied French with who said it was pretentious to read the books in French, whereas I thought it was fun to get the added bonus of new vocabulary - plus the copies I found in a secondhand bookshop were in French, so I had little choice. One day I might be brave enough to read Simenon's non-Maigret novels, but I gather they will not be as reassuring as time spent with the slightly melancholy detective.

In between the Maigrets, I read two Agatha Christies, The Clocks and Five Little Pigs. Christie's style is absolutely nothing to write home about, her characterisation is paper thin, and yet I am totally in awe of her. Despite the limitations of her writing, it is impossible not to recognise her wisdom. Here are two or three insightful lines from the two books I read:

"Extraordinarily tatty hotels always have grand names."

"When discouragement sets in, it's like dry rot."

"She had the enormous mental and moral advantage of a strict Victorian upbringing, denied to us in these days. She had done her duty in that station of life to which it had pleased God to call her, and that assurance encased her in an armour impregnable to the slings and darts of envy, discontent and regret. She had her memories and her small pleasures, made possible by stringent economies, and sufficient health and vigour to make it possible for her still to be interested in life."

I also read some books about a bird watcher and his wife who become semi-amateur detectives. I thought the premise ridiculous but they were written by Ann Cleeves, who is the creator of Vera and of Shetland, and she is another extraordinary writer, capable of making up good stories, untroubled by worrying whether she is creating "literature". 

All these books were concerned with the murder of innocent human beings so I've no idea why they cheered me up. I suppose there may be something in the theory that murder/mysteries give pleasure because the reader experiences an ordered world being disturbed and then order being restored.

Sadly as yet order has not been restored enough for me to find my lost copy of A Burnt Out Case.

Odd and Unusual Things - an Occasional Series

In the odd way of the Internet, a video clip floated onto my telephone screen the other day. It showed two men, an interviewer I didn't recognise and a man who after a bit of effort I did recognise: it was Bruce Springsteen. I don't know if the clip is recent but Springsteen looked very trim and healthy for someone who I imagine may be in his seventies.

Anyway, the interviewer asked Springsteen what song he would choose if he could only listen to one single solitary song for the rest of his life.

"Just one?" Springsteen asked and then, having received an affirmative, he thought for a bit. To my surprise, given he's a slightly bellowing kind of singer, he chose Frank Sinatra, singing a song I'd never heard of.  I looked it up. 

Here it is, in case you'd like to know what Springsteen would listen to forever if he could only choose one song:

It is rather lovely and probably as good as an answer to an impossible question as any.  

Reading 2024 - Various Continued: the Effect of Time on Humour

I have never forgotten a party my mother gave not long after she and my father divorced in the mid-1960s. My mother's best girlfriend arrived first. She and my mother stood by the window of our first floor drawing room and my mother pointed out a bright turquoise mini just drawing up. "That's Patrick Campbell", my mother told her friend. "Whatever you do don't mention the colour of his car as he's furious about it."

To my surprise some time later, when my mother's friend and Patrick Campbell found themselves standing side by side at the window at the edge of what was by then a throng of people, I heard my mother's friend open a conversation by saying:

"Look at that car - isn't it the most hideous colour? Can you imagine who would drive such a frightful thing?"

Campbell was at the time considered to be hilarious. He had come into our orbit because he was supposed to be writing something with a woman who lived across the street. I don't know if their collaboration bore fruit but the woman certainly left her husband for Campbell, and the husband subsequently killed himself. 

The events of this part of my life disturbed me as a child and they still do, while also puzzling me and making me feel a little sad.

The one thing I continued to cling to, regarding the marriage of the people across the road ending and its subsequent consequences, was the idea that Campbell was hilarious. In some obscure way, I felt that might give him license to behave badly. 

His manner suggested he believed himself funny. The reactions of others suggested they did too. I had never read anything he wrote, so I had to rely on the judgments of others - until the other day, when I saw two of his books in a secondhand bookshop. I bought them, thinking that, homewrecker though he had seemed to be, I would at least be entertained.

I wasn't. His pieces struck me as thin, uninspired and plodding. At some point, I might include some in a separate blog post to prove my point - or possibly hear from people who laughed uproariously and will accuse me of missing the point. 

Perhaps the problem is that humour dates. Or it might be something to do with Campbell's style going out of fashion. Yet Three Men in a Boat was published ages before Campbell became well known and it remains the funniest book ever written.  And as for style going out of fashion, Evelyn Waugh would have said that was a nonsensical proposition:

"Style", Waugh said, "is not a seductive decoration added to a functional structure; it is the essence of a work of art. The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance & individuality; these qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence.”

The books I bought by Campbell are illustrated by Ronald Searle and his style has definitely endured. As a result I am still glad I bought them.

I also bought a collection of the essays Alice Thomas Ellis used to write for the Spectator. These were not quite as good as I had found them when I used to read them in the magazine, but they still had many enjoyable moments. Here are my favourites:

1. She remarks about contemporary architects - 

"I should like to round them up and make them live in a tower block. For ever. When you see what they've done to our cities for ever is not long enough."

2. She claims that when truly melancholy:

"I don't want to read PG Wodehouse. When I'm really, really low only Strindberg makes me laugh."

3. As I am alarmingly untidy, I like her description of her approach to important papers:

"My system with documents and letters is usually to stuff them into the handbag of the moment until I can't close it any more and then I stuff that into the bottom of the wardrobe and buy a new one."

and her observation that "rearranging things gives me the illusion that one is tidying up."

4. She describes some pictures as being "oddly sinister in the way that only the Victorians could achieve", which seems a good insight to me.

5. The book was published way back in 1988 but already Thomas Ellis is describing how living in London she experiences "the hopeless feeling that faceless and ruthless powers are in control - local councils for the most part - ripping up the paving stones at random, closing down the little shops and authorising the erection of nightmarish mega-stores."

6. When she gets going on her loathing for cardboard boxes, she becomes unhinged enough to be truly hilarious, especially when her loathing for cardboard boxes and her dislike for Blue Peter combine, with a side reference to her hatred of pine plantations, a hatred I was particularly pleased to discover someone else nurtures (or at least used to nurture) since I have found many people think pine plantations are fine - or even, almost unbelievably, rather nice.

When I have time I might even type out the whole cardboard box essay and put it here so that other people can enjoy it, since I assume the book is no longer obtainable except by chance.

More Reading 2024 - Various Part One

Having read and enjoyed one novel by Christopher Beha I went on to read the two other novels he has written so far. The first was What Happened to Sophie Wilder. It was enjoyable but slightly baffling. Its most interesting story line deals with the demands put upon a young Catholic by a dying man. The subject of dying and how we go about it is pertinent and the resolution to the problem in this novel is unsatisfactory - or rather I found it so. Which doesn't mean to say that I did not enjoy reading the book or that my admiration diminished for Beha as he continues to create highly readable and interesting novels that do not play around with form but instead conjure up interesting characters facing the dilemmas of being human. 

The second novel I read by Beha (or the third in total) was Arts and Entertainments. The book concerns a man who, mainly because of economic pressure, becomes a participant in reality television. One of the quotations on the frontispiece is this, from Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes :

What characterises so-called advanced societies is that they today consume images and no longer, like those of the past, beliefs.

Once again, I am one hundred percent glad that Beha is writing the kinds of novels he does. However, with this one, I kept thinking The Truman Show covered the same territory pretty comprehensively. While Beha is interested in the nature of reality in a world of "reality" TV, I find this question only moderately interesting as I don't watch reality TV. Beha probably hopes to highlight our relationship to reality more generally, using reality TV merely as an emblem or paradigm. The character in the novel who controls the reality TV programme the central character gets involved in observes that he thinks watching things like the Superbowl on television is actually better than being in the stadium seeing it in real life. Given that many people at stadium events these days can't see the stage or the field and do watch most of the action on screens set around the event, one can in fact be present at an event and watch it on a screen simultaneously, as it happens. I guess it's worth highlighting such absurdities. 

Beha is also concerned with the fascination that we are encouraged to have for celebrities - but again I don't take much notice of celebrities and therefore I don't feel passionate about this element of modern life, while being aware that there are numbers of people who live in a strange bubble of fame and numbers of people who allow quite large chunks of their conscious thoughts to be taken up with speculation about those famous people. Before celebrities, royalty and the very rich occupied the same space in our imagination.

The reality TV programme controller, by the way, is a former priest who discovered when a television crew came to make a documentary about his monastery that he had actually not been looking for God all his life but for an audience. Having made this discovery, he left the priesthood and turned to TV. His comments about audiences suggest he sees an audience as an abstract entity not unlike a deity - or at the very least a force of some kind, in its own right:

"The audience only has one way of expressing its interest - by watching. They might watch because they love you. They might watch because they hate you. They might watch because they're sick. Doesn't matter. Is that good or bad? The question doesn't make any sense. Good is whatever the audience watches ... The audience is all there is."

The overwhelmingly pervasive nature of reality TV in the book makes it a failure for me. It is a satire but its exaggerated grotesquery does not marry well with its attempt to be a work of realism. In other words, having chosen to write a book that is supposed to be about people like the reader, living in a world like that in which the reader lives, Beha failed to convince me that the world he portrays, in which everyone is part of a television entertainment or part of that entertainment's audience, is real - just as I am unconvinced of the reality of anything presented as reality TV on my television. 

Never mind - there are great insights and interesting ideas dotted through the book and at no point did I get bored.