Recent Reading - The Children of Men by PD James

Many people will already know The Children of Men from its film version, which I enjoyed, while feeling it didn't completely resolve the story it told. A friend insisted that the novel was better than the film so I decided to give it a read. 

In the novel, PD James persuades her readers to imagine a world in which no babies have been born for an extremely long time. Sadly, given today's plunging birth rates, this is no longer particularly difficult to do.  It is a world where "Only on tape and records do we now hear the voices of children, only on film or on television programmes do we see the bright, moving images of the young", a world where everyone suffers in the way that at present only those who wish to have children and cannot do so suffer, a world where not just individual unlucky families but human life collectively has no future, leaving only "the grey company of the old who seemed to shuffle through Europe like a moving fog." 

James's idea is a fascinating one. However, in the book there is no more resolution of the situation she imagines than there is in the film. The narrative collapses into a spell of English Gothic, followed by a glimpse of what might have happened to Britain if a vaguely Oswald Mosleyesque figure had come to power. No explanation of what has made things go wrong is given, nor any real indication of whether things will return to normal. A ring and the power it bestows appear in the final pages, but whether its wearer will be able to resist its temptations is also left unclear.

The novel is richly imagined and tells the story of a terrible but far from impossible situation. It is the idea above all that makes the book intriguing, but too much is left unresolved and unexplained to make it a really satisfying read.

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Quotations of interest from the book:

1. As well as being prescient about the collapse of human fertility, James seems to have predicted the current unrest in Europe about rising immigration when she puts the following passage into the mouth of an authority figure questioned about the way migrants are treated:

"You're not suggesting we should have unrestricted immigration? Remember what happened in Europe in the 1990s. People became tired of invading hordes from countries with just as many natural advantages as this, who had allowed themselves to be misgoverned for decades through their own cowardice, indolence and stupidity and who expected to take over and exploit the benefits which had been won over centuries by intelligence, industry and courage, coincidentally perverting and destroying the civilisation of which they were so anxious to become part."

2. On the subject of the youngest member of this new childless society a statement is made that is true of all children, not just last generation:

"If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils."

3. An interesting point is made about history in a world where there is no future for humanity:

"History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future, is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species."

4. I think PD James is wrong about charm, when she makes the following observation in the text, but I am always interested in any attempt to understand the phenomenon:

"Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false." 

I think James does not understand that charmers are not "genuinely liking others", when they charm, but merely liking the response they get back from others.

5. There is a dissatisfied cook whose attitude reminds me very much of that of a dissatisfied cook I used to have to deal with - although my cook never made a picnic half as nice as the one described:

"Our midday meal was picnic set out for us in the kitchen, a thermos of homemade soup, bread, cheese and pate, slabs of rich home made fruit cake prepared by a lugubrious cook who managed illogically to grumble simultaneously at the small extra trouble we caused and at the lack of prestigious dinner parties at which she could display her skill."

6. James makes various observations about children that I am unsure are correct (is any generalisation about a class of people ever correct?):

"Children are always ready to believe that adult catastrophes are their fault." 

"Children are unjust and judgemental to their parents."

Additionally, surely the two statements contradict each other?

7. James's observation on the dying probably is accurate though:

"The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead."

8. James has an important female character express her views about the central character of Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. There is no need for this plot-wise, so possibly James herself wanted to get the opinion off her own chest: 

"I don't see why you should particularly pity someone who was given so much and made such poor use of it. She could have married Lord Warburton and done a great deal of good to his tenants, to the poor. All right, she didn't love him, so there was an excuse, and she had higher ambitions for herself than marriage to Lord Warburton. But what? She had no creative talent,  no job, no training. When her cousin made her rich, what did she do? Gad round the world with Madame Merle, of all people. And then she marries that conceited hypocrite and goes in for Thursday salons gorgeously dressed. What happened to all the idealism?" 

"Isabel Archer and Dorothea (in Middlemarch) both discard eligible suitors to marry self-important fools, but one sympathises more with Dorothea. Perhaps this is because George Eliot respects her heroine and, at heart, Henry James despises his."

To me this entirely misses the point: surely the novel is the story of a person's slow realisation of her deep misguidedness. It is precisely because she has been a fool and realises it that the reader feels sorry for her. It seems to me that the position of the reader of Portrait of a Lady is the position of God observing his misguided creations.

9. James, (PD, not Henry) also has her narrator say:

"Ageing is inevitable but it is not consistent. There are plateaux of time stretching over years when the faces of friends and acquaintances look virtually unchanged. Then time accelerates and within a week the metamorphosis takes place."

Is this true? I haven't particularly noticed it to be so, but perhaps it is. It is interesting to ponder.

10. Thanks to James, I felt renewed interest last time I crossed the bridge in Green Park, having just read these remarks in Children of Men:

"Crossing the bridge which spanned the lake, they paused to gaze towards Whitehall. Here, unchanged, was one of the most exciting views that London had to offer, English and yet exotic, the elegant and splendid bastions of Empire seen across shimmering water and framed in trees."

I had always liked the view from that bridge towards Horseguards (presuming it is in that direction she imagines her characters pausing and gazing), but James's insight made me see the thing with fresh eyes, for which I am grateful 

Prescience

Elizabeth Jennings died in 2001 but her poem called Euthanasia is the one that resonates with me following the recent vote in the UK parliament on “assisted dying”:

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.