Recent Reading - Shibboleth by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

Shibboleth, set in Oxford, tells the story of Edward, an English literature undergraduate with a vague family connection to Zanzibar. Edward has grown up in a part of England to which things "like quinoa or Ayurvedic medicine" haven't quite made it. While a certain type of fellow student has chosen to study English literature "because he wanted a nice, clear proof of his own ability to read, before surrendering to the cosmic inevitability of a law conversion course", Edward claims his choice of the subject arises merely from his having liked it at school. 

Edward is taken up by Youssef, a wealthy Egyptian who uses Islam as an identity, while cheerfully drinking alcohol, eating pork and doing whatever else he feels like. Through Youssef, Edward - who, from a social point of view, is from an average background - is swept up by the children of the wealthy, those who "already used all the right jargon, already knew all the best pubs, already felt in their bones which papers would condemn them to many tortuous evenings in the College library and which would allow them to cruise their way to a first if only they used the word 'hermeneutics' enough times". Soon he is dragged into university politics. 

At the beginning of the book, Edward is a bit of an innocent - Chauncey Gardiner kept coming to mind as I read, although Edward is capable of developing - and indeed, inasmuch as the book has a narrative arc, it is the arc of Edward's march towards some kind of semi-maturity. Thus, by the end of the book, having "become aware of the totemic status Palestinians had among people his age", having participated in the college rugby team, having had affairs with two women, having been wrongly accused of masterminding a very small terrorist incident, he has grown up slightly - as much as a caricature can. 

For Edward and the other figures Lambert shifts about on his fictional chessboard are not fully formed, nor are they the book's main concern. What Lambert is aiming to do is satirise Oxford student politics - and by extension, I presume, activist politics across Britain and probably the whole of the west. It therefore doesn't matter that his characters are cardboard and their dialogue sometimes clunky - Shibboleth is a kind of literary version of cartooning, an attempt at a verbal Hogarth or James Gillray picture, a portrait in words of a world - or at least a university - gone quite mad and almost entirely anti-Semitic. I do hope it is a highly exaggerated vision, like Hogarth and James Gillray's images, a caricature not a piece of realism.

Lambert has a nice turn of phrase at his best and a good eye for detail. When Edward goes to a poetry reading, Lambert describes the first participant as "a gruesome little haikuist with an earlobe stretcher". Shattering the romantic dream of Oxford so dear to Americans in particular, he describes the city centre thus: "It was a typical weekday in the centre of Oxford: there were homeless people strumming guitars, Muslims preaching from their pergolas." When Edward decides to change from the Shakespeare paper to something more "up-to-date", he is told by his newly-imported-from-America tutor: "Evaluative criticism is over. Themes - that's what you want. Ideas. Frameworks. Critical lenses" and advised that "Academia is a game" and the important thing is to identify the factions, "The Freudians. The digital humanities people. The affect theory lot. The textualists. The Comp-Litters. The people who work with the Department of Continuing Education. The old guys who are listed along with the buildings. There's nothing but factions in this place." At a college dinner, Edward's companions "all foraged in their wallets and one by one pulled out various dietary cards supplied by the College, Youssef with Halal, Conrad with various food intolerances he blamed on the Hapsburg strand of his lineage, and Angelica with a whole five poker hand that covered her newfound veganism, her seasonal eating disorders, the set of rules stricter than any known creed that governed her body." Lambert targets diversity training as often as possible. In the character of Liberty, he creates an ambitious and cunning monster who, despite being indifferent to study and deep thought, will almost certainly rise to the pinnacle of the academic world. To keep us from total despair, he also gives us Professor Burgess, a flicker of hope in the chaos; sadly though, she is old and almost blind. 

He also gives us Rachel, a German girl who happens to be Jewish. I wonder if Lambert sees her as his most important character. In a way she is, for the not inconsiderable task of trying to articulate a way through the anti-Semitism in which the world of the book is steeped is given to her. She does quite a good job, but she is really just another mouthpiece for the author. In that capacity, she also provides some amusing commentary on English mores, telling Edward: "Here people lie. They lie like nowhere I've ever been before. They'll make those squealing noises when you walk in the room, and tell you they love your terrible outfit" and questions one of the most unassailable of contemporary shibboleths, the notion of “feeling unsafe”, declaring:

“I think, ‘I feel unsafe’ is just something people have learned to say because it gets the grown-ups to notice them. Most of the Jewish students who say they feel unsafe just say it because it’s the only way they can make their case without everyone calling them a fascist.”

I really admire Europa Editions for publishing something that attacks the fashionable idiocy of pro-Palestine, Islam-loving politics. However, one thing I don't admire the company for is their copy editing - the book is riddled with sentences where words are either repeated unnecessarily or totally left out - and sentences that are inelegantly tangled and in need of further work. Leaving that aside, I recommend Shibboleth. Like all satire it is horrifying - but it is also entertaining. I hope like really successful satire it will change things - but I am not optimistic. 

Craftsmanship

What happened to the impulse to make things .

Until the other day the sub-heading of this post would have been a question:

“What happened to the impulse to make things?”

Most people might not be interested in this question, but I love making things. In fact, I have wasted acres of my life making things. Mostly things that involve sewing or knitting.

As it happens, in my family I am alone in the impulse to make things. This impulse may simply be the result of being sent to a Froebel School.

Wherever it came from though, I derive pleasure from spending time listening to rubbishy crime fiction novels while putting a garment or a curtain or bedspread together - even though the finished results are often lumpy and hang oddly and even the very best among them lack some element that might be called dash or style.

And because the activity gives me pleasure and visits to museums have suggested to me that in the past far more people also indulged in the business of handicraft, I have wondered why so many of my contemporaries now find such activities unappealing (indeed, when I worked on a magazine about crafts that was put out by the Crafts Council and mentioned that I made patchwork, the editor at the time looked horrified: “Ugh”, she said, “I hate making things”.)

Anyway since the other afternoon, I know the answer. It happened that I went on a long walk through Bristol on bin day and at last everything became clear. The impulse to indulge in handicrafts is not dead at all - it has simply been redirected into recycling activities. The hours spent by local citizens in folding cardboard and aligning bottleware for collection must be so numerous there could never be a moment left for embroidery or anything that creates an object that might be useful and enduring. The care and skill once poured out on making things now goes into the business of arranging rubbish as attractively as possible for removal. It is very hard to understand why.

View draft history

The Plastic Hierarchy

Why are some things made of plastic anathema, while others are increasingly welcomed with open arms?

In May 2019, Britain - or at least a politician called Michael Gove who was Environment Secretary at the time - got in a wild panic about plastic straws and plastic stemmed cotton buds and banned them for all but medical use. Now, if you want to buy plastic straws in the UK, you can still do so - but only at a pharmacist.

I don’t use straws much, so the decision hasn’t really affected me. As I have always tried to avoid plastic wherever possible, because I think it is ugly and I imagine that its manufacture involves factories hidden away somewhere (probably China) belching out smoke that I would not wish to breathe, I am glad about any push to avoid plastic.

However, what I cannot comprehend is the focus on these two relatively rarely used items, while plastic objects are increasing in almost every other area of life. For instance, it has just been the season for strawberries. When I was a child you could only buy them in little woven raffia punnets - now they come almost exclusively in hard plastic boxes. Once, if you bought fish or meat, it would be wrapped up in paper - now most meat and fish bought in the Western world is sold in plastic containers.

In the bathroom too, plastic has been making inroads. Have you noticed that toothpaste tubes, which used to be made of some kind of flexible metal, have suddenly become exclusively plastic? And no one - even my most extreme green friends - seems to buy solid soap anymore. Everywhere I go, bars of soap have been replaced in bathrooms and kitchens by plastic pump-action bottles filled with so-called liquid soap. Washing liquids similarly have superseded washing powder and as a result countless plastic bottles are manufactured, where once cardboard boxes were fine.

If plastic is noxious and our plastic cast-offs are filling the ocean in alarming quantities, our leaders ought to be looking at plastic usage much more widely. Leaving aside the question of whether banning anything is acceptable - rather than educating people not to want the item in question - banning a few straws and a couple of cottonbuds is pathetic tokenism and typical of the second-rate way in which we are governed now. While Michael Gove virtue-signalled with cotton buds and straws, he distracted us from the mountains of plastic that are creeping into every nook and cranny of our lives.

It doesn’t make any sense.

Absent Fathers

Happy birthday to my witty, elegant, mildly melancholic father. I wish I could find the photograph that shows him in the Gobi with an eagle on his arm. This one of him, in the vast empty spaces of Mongolia, in a suit and tie, representing his country, will have to do. He'd have been 103 today. He cherished Britain and spent his life trying to keep it safe. He would be deeply unhappy about what it has become.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/john-colvin-37281.html

 

Fourteenth Century Dugh

Today I went to see the exhibition at the National Gallery in London of art from 14th century Siena. It is marvellous and there are many delights to choose from among the exhibits. But on a Friday night, when parents of teenagers everywhere are facing a weekend of wrangling grumpy youth, I decided the painting of Christ Discovered in the Temple, made by Simone Martini way back in 1349, was the one to choose to post - for its value as encouragement. There is grumpy young Christ, looking at his parents with the irritated disdain of Harry Enfield's teenager Kevin. 

Christ turned out all right. Other teenagers may not reach Christ's heights, but don't despair.

Missing the Greatness

 Once again I am banging my head against my incomprehension in the face of great works of art.

As already documented on this blog Proust (in the original French no less) already defeated me when I (or Proust) reached the hawthorns - and not only me, apparently, but also an American called Russell Baker whose account of his struggles was sent to me by George from 20011 blog.

Now I am, not for the first time, tackling TS Eliot's Four Quartets. So many people admire these poems, not least, (from my perspective), my dad. I have never sufficiently admired TS Eliot - to the extent that when I heard someone request The Waste Land as their Desert Island book the other day, I actually said out loud, “Noooo, you'll be disappointed; it truly hasn't THAT many depths to reveal.” I don't think The Waste Land is rubbish, by the way, (and actually I know bits of it off by heart, because I have read it so many times). However, while I understand that at the time it was published it must have seemed excitingly unlike anything published before, I don't think it stands up to long, close scrutiny.

And as I begin on Eliot's Quartets I slam up once more against the familiar obstacles: I just don't think Eliot is an exceptionally great poet and it seems to me that, to hide this fact, he often took refuge in being odd and obscure. I acknowledge that many people adore obscurity, perhaps because it gives them a role, an opportunity to project, to create in a way in that empty space where meaning ought to be. But I prefer meaning.

The particular line I have banged up against this time is the one that begins the second section of Burnt Norton:

"Garlic and sapphires in the mud"

Is that genuinely a good image? Does it really speak to anyone with clarity? If it does, what does it say ( beyond conjuring a very peculiar picture in the reader's mind)?”

Recent Reading

Not as good as other books I’ve read by the author. I have the impression he set himself the task of writing a novel a year, or similar, and as a result he ploughed on to get one out as each temporal milestone loomed up, regardless of its quality. Moderately entertaining.

Favourite quotation: “His chronic sense of the perplexing character of the moral universe descended upon him heavily.

Well-written, slightly dated stories set in the nearish past. Possibly the nearish past is the time most likely to seem slightly dated, as it is the period that many readers remember and, in reading it described, they recognise suddenly that it no longer exists. In a way the stories are horror stories, in that they concern a world where there is very little love. The general tenor of the book is faintly melancholic.

Favourite quotation: This isn’t exactly a favourite, but it gives a sense of the book’s tone and the writer’s power of observation - “It was years since he had ridden in a bus. He had forgotten how the seats smelled, made hot by the sun through glass, and the rough white tickets that came whirring out of the machine.”

This began intriguingly but ended up as a bit of agit-prop about why we should be nice to illegal migrants. The idea that people who oppose unrestricted migration need to have it explained to them that illegal migrants are as human as they are is a patronising one. The question of open borders is not about emotions but about the practicality of large numbers of people who don't like aspects of the places where they live abandoning those places and movng to better-run, more orderly places, bringing with them all their cultural differences, unresolved resentments and inflated expectations. Leaving everything else aside, what becomes of the place they leave behind? Is it morally acceptable to give up on somewhere and see whether you can hitch yourself to another nation that has, through centuries of political convulsion and struggle, reached a place of stability and shared vision?

Favourite quotation: If I were to quote a sentence from the book, I’m sorry to say that it would only be to point out that the line editor did not do a careful enough job. Some clunky, ungrammatical lines have been left in, together with some analogies that don’t really work.

This book, an updated version of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, has had some terrible reviews, mainly because for some people Jane Austen is an object of worship and therefore it is sacrilege to play around with her work. I find Austen’s authorial voice irritating and therefore am not bothered if someone plays around with her work. I really enjoyed this clever, light hearted book.

Favourite quotation: The book is very light and I am not sure that any one line or paragraph is really worth repeating but I liked the modern twist given to the younger sister's rogue lover.

An extraordinary book about a man’s dedication to obeying God’s will. Highly recommend for those interested in Christianity.

Favourite quotation: “The work of the kingdom, the work of labouring and suffering with Christ, is no more spectacular for the most part than the routine of daily living.”

(I took this at random, where the page fell open - there are plenty of other candidates within the book)

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this, given that it is whimsical. I went on to read another by the same author, the name of which I have forgotten - something involving lanterns? I am baffled by how much I enjoy the light dreamy atmosphere of Hoffman’s books. They are like pastries made by an expert pastry chef.

Favourite quotation: Like Anne Tyler, the authorial voice in Hoffman is omnipotent, telling the reader everything (compare Jane Gardam’s method in her story Blue Poppies, which is a masterclass in how to create a fictional world in a less intrusive way). However, Hoffman pulls off the same authorial voice as Tyler without being maddening, perhaps because the world she creates is not a real one, but slightly magical and clearly make-believe, the stuff of legend, which needs a narrator - “She’d already had more than her share of botched relationships, yet she’d agreed to have dinner with Eric, ever hopeful despite the statistics that promised her an abject and lonely old age” provides an example of what I mean. I forgot to say that recently I did actually drag myself through Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and I couldn’t bear it, because I felt she sets up characters and moves them about like chesspieces. They have no depth, no reality. It is campfire storytelling. Of course it is also a matter of taste and it is not to my taste. Returning to this book, “There are those who will use any excuse to throw caution to the wind” is a mildly amusing Hoffmann aside, I suppose; however the sentence goes on to descend into whimsy.

Spark is having a moment, thanks to a new biography about her. I think she is often almost brilliant and almost always fairly annoying. The book is concerned with evil and with madness - and, after Spark's odd fashion, Catholicism. 

Evil is a fascinating subject, but Spark doesn’t deal with it particularly satisfactorily here, preferring to amuse herself and slightly forgetting about pleasing the reader, (as elsewhere in her work, there is a faint sense that she rather despises her readers - and possibly all human beings). 

Favourite quote: Spark's description of EU bureaucrat Ernst's addiction to trying to imagine what things might be worth at auction:

"When he visited the Pope, even then, he couldn't help calculating the Pope's worldly riches (life-proprietor of the Vatican and contents...) Ernst knew it  was a frightful habit, but he told himself it was realistic; and it was too exciting altogether ever to give up, this mental calculation of what beauty ws worth on the current market." 

Additionally, despite the book being published in 1990, Spark has a character who has “a job as a junior researcher in artificial intelligence, the bionics branch. He explained this artificial intelligence: the study of animal intelligence systems as patterns for mechanical devices, a mixed science involving electronics and biology.”

I bought this because I wanted to get a glimpse of life among ambitious and upwardly mobile citizens in Lagos. It was vivid and I quite enjoyed it, although the ending was mildly puzzling.

Favourite quotation: There is an interesting admission that slavery has been practised by people other than whites - "We sold slaves to them. We had slaves too, in Africa. Before and after.” 

Mind you the character who says this is disapproved of for doing so.

A well-meaning attempt to raise awareness about grooming gangs via fiction, this novel reveals the fact that Scruton, like Barry Humphries and AA Gill, could not write a good novel, despite being an exceptionally brilliant person. At least he was in good company.

Favourite quote: better not to go there.