I was attracted to Station Eleven because it is a story about what happens when a new and extremely lethal virus arrives in the world; I hoped it might give me a better understanding of what happened to us all over the last two years.
The novel was published in 2014 and the virus it imagines kills 99 per cent of those it comes in contact with. The action switches back and forth from not long before the pandemic hits to the aftermath, describing what existence is like for those who still remain.
Given that St John Mandel's fictional virus is so extremely deadly, I ended up feeling that the contemporary parallel the book reflects most clearly is not actually the events following the appearance of COVID19 but the situation now, as we move mostly blithely through what may be the last days before an outbreak, large or small, of nuclear warfare.
Station Eleven is one of the most entertaining contemporary works of fiction that I have read in ages. It is very intricately constructed, (possibly a little too much so, slightly straining the reader's credulity occasionally). Even though until the very end there isn't a really urgent plot line, it kept me glued. I don't think it is the kind of novel that leaves you wiser at the end, or provides an insight into humanity or existence, but it is exceptionally imaginative, clever and compulsive. I enjoyed every page and, unlike so many novels, it didn't peter out towards the end.
Being at heart a trivial person, I read with great interest an article in yesterday's Telegraph about a book on the Royal Family that has just been published.
Although trivial, I am not persistent. If gossip is put in front of me, I lap it up, but I don't go out of my way to find it (well, I did once - when living in Vienna, learning German, I bought a very downmarket magazine that published a transcript of a conversation Prince Charles had on the telephone with Camilla Parker-Bowles; I told myself I did this purely in order to practise my German; I certainly ended up happy that I had read the ghastly exchange through the filter of a foreign language; even with the slight muffling of meaning that comes from having to look up lots of words while reading, it was a pretty sordid exchange that still makes me wince when I think of it).
Anyway, I haven't followed Windsor family business assiduously enough to have been aware that a person called "Porchie" (Lord Porchester to those who did not know him) had at one stage been a very close friend of the Queen.
As soon as I learned of his existence, however, I wanted to get a look at him, and so I began combing the internet for his image. In about 25 seconds I came upon this picture, taken by Robert Jackson. The man on the left, walking beside the Queen is "Porchie". He looks adorable.
But whether or not he looked adorable no longer interested me because I had become riveted by the picture itself. Looking at it, I saw the world I was born into and I realised that every vestige of it has been swept away.
The things that make me nostalgic about the scene are myriad but probably right at the very top of the list is the utter lack of commercialisation visible anywhere and the complete nonchalance of the other racegoers about the fact that the Queen is only feet away.
What happened to women like the one in the hat seen here striding forward? She has either just seen her horse win and is off to collect her winnings, or she is going to find her husband to command him to hand over another 10 bob. For what it's worth, I think he is called Reggie, and I imagine he may be hiding, downing a stiff gin and enjoying a break from that masterful personality with whom he has signed up to a lifetime of marriage.
And what became of all the women like the one glimpsed side-on behind the determined strider? She has a strong resemblance to Edna Everage in her original Moonee Ponds iteration
And there is another of her ilk in the left-hand corner of this part of the picture.
No one is fat, everyone is dressed well. They all have proper shoes on - that alone is extremely rare now. I know this for a fact, because I have lately developed the habit of counting the number of people I see when I go out who are not wearing factory-made sports shoes - and the numbers are invariably close to zero.
Are things better in our new era? Or simply different? Is my sadness at losing the circumstances of life one can see a bit of in this picture simply due to the fact that what I see here is the world of my childhood and I liked that world simply because being a child is a time that, at least in retrospect, seems rather less exhausting than being an adult?
I do have a distrust of change and what is claimed to be progress, but I think that distrust is not unreasonable. I believe that a time when people made shoes with craftsmanship rather than industrial machinery and plastic extrusions was not only more stylish but more pleasant for those engaged in the shoemaking - and this applied more generally. Whatever the economics of smallscale manufacturing, I am convinced the social good of working in a skilled job, making or mending things, was considerable. Being apprenticed to learn a trade meant becoming a person who had mastered something. Leaving school now, the closest most young people will come to a job where they feel they are slowly learning a trade is getting a barista certificate.
Of course back then it was virtually impossible to get a decent cup of coffee in Britain. Eating out was also not much done. By today's standards, things were frightfully dull and boring. All the same, I sometimes I wonder if things haven't now become a bit too exciting. I feel that I am bombarded with distracting novelty to the extent that novelty has become faintly addictive. Slow and steady activities like reading, thinking, maybe even making something seem, by contrast, to take too long.
By the way, can you guess when the picture was taken? I couldn't. I assumed it must have been about 1960 or '61, but a picture from the same day is labelled as being taken on 30th September 1969. Astonishing to realise that even then the old ways hadn't been entirely swept away.
In the beautiful old police station in Goulburn, New South Wales, Australia, there is a secondhand bookshop that takes up five or six rooms and is a bit of a treasure trove.
On a rainy day recently, I dropped in and bought the three books in this picture:
The first I read was the Graham Greene. Greene described the book as a "frivolity". In the first half of the story you are on tenterhooks that poverty will result in disaster and in the second half you are led to almost believe that wealth, at least for some people, can have its own devastating consequences. I enjoyed the book. If you are fond of Graham Greene, you probably will as well.
After Loser Takes All I read the Penelope Lively. It is set in London, partly in a 'now' that is a three or four decades ago and partly in the Blitz. The parallel storylines didn't quite work for me - tricky fictional structures like this often distract me when reading, which is probably a symptom of my lack of sophistication.
In the more modern part of the story, (such as it is), the main character is an architect called Mark who spent his childhood looking at buildings and trying to make out how they were put together. He drives about London seeing it as a jigsaw of time. His musings are quite beguiling and full of ideas but I didn't really feel any great interest in this character or any of the others, (and I point blank did not accept that the really ruthless villain portrayed in its pages bore any resemblance to anyone real - not that I didn't believe in his wickedness but that I didn't believe in his stupid behaviour towards the main character).
In the book, Lively chooses to shift from present tense to past tense and then back to present tense, with no real reason, which I found annoying. It also seemed to me that she had tried, unsuccessfully, to shove an essay into a fictional framework. One striking thing about the novel though is the pre 9/11 innocence of the contents, particularly noticeable in the descriptions of tower blocks being constructed - there is absolutely no hint in the text that they might be turned into targets.
Overall, I found City of the Mind entertaining to begin with, but rather tedious after a while - not incompetent but too carefully wrought and confected. The essence of the problem for me was that I didn't care at all about the main character. It is hard to know in such circumstances whether that is the writer or the reader's fault.
Finally, I read the Michael Innes. Published in 1941, it tells the story of Inspector Appleby being shipwrecked and having to solve a murder on an island. By contemporary standards the book's language is very racist, in the sense that the white characters and the black characters are intensely aware of the other's colour. Being black isn't considered a bad thing by most of the characters, but it is considered a notable thing - those who are black are seen as 'other' in a way that is no longer encouraged. If the reader can leave that aside, the book is fun, as Innes's Appleby fables usually (although not always) are.
In case anyone doesn’t know (I didn’t until I looked it up just now) “wimmin” is a plural spelling of women created by feminists to avoid having “-men” in the word. How Alice Thomas Ellis would have felt about that is probably clear from her reply to the question:
“What is the most important event in women’s history?”
Appropriately for today, 25 March where I am, this was Ellis’s reply:
“The Annunciation.”
(Here are a couple of passages from Ellis’s novel Pillars of Gold that particularly amuse me:
In the first, the book's main character is assaulted by absurd [but, to me, not completely unfamiliar] media-induced anxieties as she tries to decide what is the best thing to do with some courgettes (zucchini to Australians) she is cooking for her daughter:
"... if she immersed them in water, their vitamin C content would dissipate. She could cook them now and reheat them, but that, she believed, would be deleterious to their nutritional value: it would perhaps be best to entrap them, with their vitamins and trace minerals, in a china bowl enveloped in clingfilm in the coolness of the fridge, taking care that the film did not touch them lest some cancer-inducing chemical should migrate from the one to the other. Next she considered the potatoes: in the past she had always cooked them in their skins, but recently it had been suggested that potato skins, if not carcinogenic, were yet harmful to the system, perforating the bowel or preventing it from absorbing the vital vitamins. She scraped them carefully and put them in a steel pan ... Scarlet had thrown away all her old aluminium pans since she had learned that they might cause Alzheimer's disease ... The chicken, which she next drew from the fridge, had, so the label proclaimed, ranged freely over a district of France before being hygienically and humanely slaughtered and packed. It somehow gave the impression that the fowl had led such a delightful and pleasurable existence that it was a positive act of virtue to eat it."
In the second, the trials of this woman continue, as she tries to engage with her teenage daughter:
"Do I look all right?" asked Scarlet. She was wearing what she considered to be an ageless garment - a hip-length coat of black watered taffeta; the shoulders were rather too narrow and too sharply defined to be precisely fashionable, but the material was of most superior quality. Underneath this she wore black cotton trousers - ideally these should have been made of silk, but she felt sure no one would notice. "You look wonderful," said Camille without raising her eyes from the television set. She had eaten her supper" [which included the pristine courgettes, I think] "and was beginning to feel hungry again. 'No, really,' said Scarlet. Camille fell to her knees from the sofa and gave her mother's leg a patronizing pat. 'You've got a sweet little face,' she said. Scarlet, though not reassured by her words, was touched by her gesture until she saw that Camille was merely reaching for the crisp packet and had patted her in passing. 'Do these shoes go with these trousers?' she asked. 'Yes,' said Camille, her fingers deep in the crispbag. 'You didn't look,' said Scarlet. 'Are they too old-fashioned?' 'No,' said Camille. Scarlet gave up. Only a few years before, Camille had been acutely conerned about her mother's appearance, sometimes refusing to be seen with her in public, but now it seemed that she no longer minded: she had expropriated from Scarlet's wardrobe those few articles that she felt would suit herself and had thereafter left her mother to her own devices. It gave Scarlet the impression that she had grown very old and from now on might just as well go round in her shroud.")
Having been shut out of Australia for a long time, we have at last been allowed to return. With the links of familiarity broken by absence, it is almost like visiting somewhere new. But, unlike going to a place you've never been, going home after a long, forced exile, brings your memories and expectations up against the reality of your former homeland, which, inevitably, has altered in the time since you left.
I remember an Australia full of wit and fun, as exemplified by the wonderful television comedy that this blog's title echoes, Australia You're Standing in It, of which Tim and Debbie's Brain Space was always my favourite segment:
But the last two years have taken their toll on joie de vivre and silliness, it seems.
The first thing we noticed after getting here is that many, many Australians, despite being vaccinated, remain thoroughly spooked by the virus that most governments have reacted to with lockdowns and other extreme measures. In Canberra, a place where, if you are walking, you are almost certain not to encounter another living soul, we watched a young woman pushing a pram up Anzac Parade, solitary, on an enormous street, her face almost invisible beneath a mask.
The only danger she faced from the virus was from us as we drove past, maskless - all the other cars we saw contained solitary drivers, each one masked, with the windows up.
Of course, we remember our own initial panic when we were told about this new virus and shown the videos of people falling down in the street and sitting in Italian hospitals with fishbowls on their heads. Two years on though, (and fully vaccinated), we have read enough to know that panic is not sensible, and facemasks in the open air are pointless, especially for people youthful enough to be the mothers of babies in prams.
But in Australia, despite the worldwide web, people seem cut off from the "Hell, let's live with it" attitude and remain possessed by fear.
And perhaps as a result of the febrile atmosphere, Australian politics seem to have hit new lows. Nothing that new there, but what is shocking to me is the way that the state-run broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, an organisation charged with presenting a diversity of perspectives, never stating or implying that any perspective is the editorial opinion of the ABC and never misrepresenting or unduly favouring any perspective, seems hellbent on bringing down the current government, led by Scott Morrison, who will be facing an election in the next couple of months.
Scott Morrison is not an exciting leader, but he has a certain steady-as-you-go quality that just at this moment in history strikes me as not the worst attribute for someone to possess who is at your country's helm.
Morrison came to the job of Prime Minister after years of political turmoil, which started when Kevin Rudd took the leadership of the Australian Labor Party and briefly succeeded in getting most of the voting public to fall in love with him. Rudd won the next election and then disappointed the electorate very quickly. Julia Gillard ousted him, but never won the hearts of the electorate and was forced to govern with the help of two rural independents whose own voters were furious that they had thrown in their hats with the left. Rudd ousted Gillard and another election was fought, at which Tony Abbott won a commanding victory.
Although he had overwhelmingly won over the public, Abbott faced many within his own party who disliked the fact that he was a Christian, was not a supporter of gay marriage and understood that, while Australia could not solve climate change by itself, it could ruin its economy if it went ahead, without China also acting in good faith, and decarbonised.
Abbott was ousted by an extremely ambitious, socially more liberal colleague called Malcolm Turnbull. I listened to Turnbull quite recently, when he was speaking at the funeral of an Australian businessman who operated in Russia. Turnbull's highest praise for the dead businessman was reserved for the brilliant way in which that businessman concealed from the investors Turnbull had taken to Russia the worrying truth - namely, that the people they were being encouraged to go into joint venture with were extreme fascists, bigots and half-mad. Turnbull's admiration for such unscrupulous behaviour gives a glimpse of the kind of moral compass Australia's Prime Minister had while Turnbull was in charge.
Turnbull did not make any effort to win over voters when election time came, as his own self-belief told him that he would win a landslide. Instead, he very nearly lost and, as a result of his poor performance, Morrison was put in. To my surprise, Morrison went on to win the next election very handsomely and almost single-handedly.
Morrison is absolutely not cool or trendy. I imagine him in a different life being the deputy headmaster of a large secondary school. Perhaps it is because there is nothing inner-city about him, no hint of the vegan, no sense that he might harbour a secret passion for quinoa - or perhaps it is because he belongs to a pentecostal Christian church (uber-uncool) - but he is constantly mocked and spoken of scornfully, and he generally gets a consistently mocking press. He is referred to routinely as "Scotty from Marketing", because he ran Tourism Australia in an earlier part of his life - he was responsible, I think, for that embarrassing, but memorable, "Where the bloody hell are you?" campaign to encourage visitors to come down under. But I think, as well, he was responsible for this, possibly the most lovely promotional video ever made:
In his term in office, Morrison has had to deal with bushfires and flooding - and the media insist that he has dealt with them uniquely badly. I have an idea that no one whose house has burned down or been filled with muddy water is ever happy, and no leader can ever get much right in such crises - particularly in a country with such a huge land mass and such a scattered population as Australia. *
Morrison also mismanaged the pandemic, according to all comers, and I would agree with this, except that the charge against him is that he wasn't strict enough, whereas my view is that lockdowns were an enormous mistake.
Anyway, I don't exactly love Morrison, but I don't think he is a terrible person or a very bad leader. Whatever I think about him is, in any case, not really relevant to what I want to talk about, which is the relentless, blatant - to my eyes new and deeply shocking - bias of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
To give an illustration of what I mean, here are two comedy sketches, both broadcast in primetime yesterday evening. They do not make any attempt to hide their contempt for Scott Morrison. In the first, they focus on a single, possibly slightly ill-judged, picture Morrison posted on his Facebook page, shortly after he had been forced to stay at home because he had tested positive for the virus. The posts all around this one were to do with important issues, demonstrating that his mind was on the floods and the Ukraine situation and all the other things that a Prime Minister needed to be focussing on. But the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's weekly performer chose to grab this single piece of light-heartedness and use it as an indictment, as if Morrison was doing nothing at all beyond posting pictures of his cat. The scorn, the hatred that drips from this performance has no place at the public broadcaster:
The second item to pop up, a very short time later, yesterday evening was this, a "comedy sketch" that not only implies that all those working in parliament for the government side of politics are people without principle, but also attacks a judicial decision, which is odd, given the left is usually full of outrage at any hint that the cherished independence and integrity of the courts come under scrutiny:
No doubt, with the help of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australia will soon have a new government. Whether that will be because it is necessary or simply because the population has been gently stewed in a rich gravy of government funded (yet anti-government) propaganda is something we may never know.
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*I won't go into the whole question of land management and poor zoning and new ideas about bush flammability and how to prepare for fires, but my many relatives who live on the land point to newfangled ways of doing things as the cause of a lot of the fire and flooding problems that have arisen over the past few years, combined with the arrival in rural areas of more and more people who love the idea of a little place in the country but who do not understand exactly what living in rural Australia and staying safe entails.
Sadly, I was completely wrong and it turns out that Putin is mad, not merely bad - and the results are terrifying. This clip gives us a glimpse of the man (or should that be monster?) as he is right now
A Russian pointed out on Twitter a few days ago that senior Russian military should consider the fact that to fight a war in Ukraine means thousands upon thousands of Russian casualties, whereas to avoid a war in Ukraine requires only one single casualty. Unfortunately, this did not inspire a new Stauffenberg - at least not yet, (I continue to hope and pray that one might come along - and succeed).
To add to the bleakness, in this new appalling situation I cannot see who are the goodies. Putin is both mad and bad, and meanwhile in the West we seem to have lost our bearings. The comparison one sees here between Russian and US recruitment publicity gives an insight into how far we have strayed from commonsense.
Allister Heath highlighted this with his usual clarity in the Telegraph:
While the West has largely condemned Russia’s move on Ukraine, it too is racked with its own internal ideological rejection of the modern, liberal-conservative order. Communism never really stood a chance in Europe and America, and a capitalist and democratic West thus triumphed in the Cold War; but the woke ideology, best understood as an anti-capitalist, anti-Western secular religion, has already captured much of the intelligentsia in America, Canada, New Zealand and increasingly Britain.
In its extreme form, it represents a rejection of the Enlightenment, of freedom and reason; Western history is reviled as uniquely bad, rather than as a remarkable experiment in self-improvement. Individualism is replaced by collectivism and neo-feudalism, and Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colour-blind society by balkanised identity politics. Free speech is dismissed as “oppressive”. Dissenters are cancelled, with cultural institutions, capital and corporations happy to help impose this new orthodoxy. The fear is that technology will be used to increase the power of this new ruling class, rather than to liberate the masses. The rise of a related extreme environmentalism – another millenarianist movement, more concerned with self-flagellation than protecting nature – has already encouraged a series of catastrophic errors, not least the abandonment of nuclear and greater dependency on Russian gas."
Meanwhile in the Spectator, Freddy Gray pointed out that, extraordinarily, the West was safer under another unpredictable leader, rather than a bien pensant (which is a nice way of describing Biden):
"Putin, as a slightly comic alpha male authoritarian, saw in Trump something he recognised — an unstable, unpredictable yet potentially decisive actor on the world stage. Rightly or wrongly, he saw in Trump strength whereas in the Democratic leadership he sees only weakness and folly...In its demented ego-driven way, Trump’s view of the way the world works is intriguingly coherent. And painful though it may be for the many experts who have spent years denouncing him as a disastrous monster to admit, he could well be right: if he were in the White House, Putin probably wouldn’t be doing what he is doing."
The consequences for Taiwan are highlighted in this truly fascinating and deeply worrying Tweet thread (the implications for the West's possible retaliatory optionsof Putin's threat that he might use nuclear weapons are also well laid out there.)
Luckily there is always poetry and a commenter on Unherd hascontributed this beautiful translation of an Anna Akhmatova poem which, if not exactly cheering, offers a perspective from above the fray:
Everything is Plundered, Betrayed, Sold’ Anna Akhmatova
Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold, Death’s great black wing scrapes the air, Misery gnaws to the bone. Why then do we not despair? By day, from the surrounding woods, Cherries blow summer into town; at night the deep transparent skies glitter with new galaxies. And the miraculous comes so close to the ruined, dirty houses – something not known to anyone at all, but wild in our breast for centuries.
Lovely though that is, there is no escaping the fact that we are in the biggest pickle of my lifetime.
On 30 December, 2021, my throat started hurting and I began repeatedly sneezing and I realised I was getting some kind of cold. I was staying in a house with countless other people, some of them possibly 'vulnerable' (although all three times vaccinated). Panic gripped me. What if I killed someone by infecting them with the scythe-wielding virus that has stalked us all for over two years now?
Luckily, someone had a test kit, and it turned out I was not suffering from the monster. All the same, I went on feeling rather awful, coughing and feeling generally fairly out of sorts. I did tests from time to time and each one came back negative. It must be hypochondria, I thought, dragging myself through the days, functioning well below normal, my appetite diminished - (although, being me, I ate on steadfastly, regardless) - listless and increasingly feeling that life was barely worth living. Occasionally, I'd do another test, just to see if I'd been got by the virus - it is supposed to be so catching and so dangerous, after all.
Finally, this Monday, having once again tested negative, I sent my doctor a tentative email: I didn't have the virus so I understood that she might not want to be bothered with me, but I had been feeling rather lousy, for some unknown reason, for more than a month. She graciously slotted me into her schedule later that day.
I arrived at her office full of apologies. I didn't want to bother her, when there was a real illness about, but somehow, despite not having THAT illness, I did still feel sick.
Bronchitis, it turned out. That was the problem. Contrary to what I'd begun to believe, there are other things that can make you unwell - and, by the time I went to see her, it had got quite bad.
Three cheers for antibiotics. Boo to tunnel vision. Hurray that I at last feel vaguely on the mend.
