Just books for once

I'm busy beyond reason this week so won't detain you for long. I also am very conscious that I've moaned a lot, so I promise not to this time. All my friends at other universities are on strike and while it's a terrible thing to have to do, I do feel a bit left out. My branch only managed a 29% turnout, well below the legal minimum required. In case the boss class is reading this, it's because we're exhausted, not because we love you.

So: non-moaning activities. Well, I've been stuck deep inside Hamlet all week, preparing for a couple of weeks devoted to it. I bought Emma Smith's new book on Shakespeare's plays, highly recommended by many people, though it feels unfinished to me - lots of introductory ideas or big picture assertions, but too short and snappy. I loved the idea that Othello is a comedy that goes wrong though, and her view of Hamlet as primarily a nostalgic work is a useful counter to the many readings that see it as the Birth of Modernity, but I don't share her identification with the aristocracy. She says it ends apocalyptically, with the royal family dead and foreign Fortinbras grabbing the throne. Greek dramatic tradition says that it's only a tragedy if important people suffer – nobody cares if the bin man pops his clogs early – and so technically Hamlet is a tragedy. We don't have to be tied to this though: as far as the ordinary Danes are concerned, one inbred toff is likely to be as bad as another. Old Hamlet admits he committed terrible crimes, but there's no evidence that Claudius has or will. Perhaps he'll be a better king. Maybe he'll be better than young Hamlet, who is paralysed by indecision. Certainly Fortinbras hasn't done anyone any harm, and the idea that a foreigner might be less destructive than a native is a poke in the eye for the Elizabethan ancestors of the Brexiters, who were soon to acquire a Scottish king.

Anyway, here's my favourite Hamlet adaptation. You can thank me later.



I've also been reading, and weirdly for me, it's been ten days of male authors: two of Gilbert Adair's Evadne Mount crime pastiches, which were highly entertaining and clearly a labour of love. Well worth reading if you adore 1930s Golden Age crime thrillers. Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk is a scary account of the Trump government's version of Michael Gove's 'we've had enough of experts' but also a love letter to career bureaucrats and the necessity of good government – much needed in this climate. I enjoyed Jonathan Lethem's As She Climbed Across The Table for the prose but did find myself wondering if we needed yet another semi-postmodernist novel about young male intellectuals' emotional inadequacies, however well-written. It is very funny, but you do need to have read way too much psychoanalytic critical theory to get to that point. Larry Niven's Ringworld also suffers badly from the passage of time: it's sexual dynamics are pretty retro to say the least, but the scientific imagination and plotting are impressive. I finally got round to Tom Wolfe's New Journalistic account of the encounters between limousine liberals and the Black Panthers, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. As an exercise in style, superb, but as a critique of 1960s liberation movements, shallow and privileged. Only someone untouched by racial and sexual discrimination could casually satirise the efforts of both the oppressed and their well-meaning allies to do something about it. Certainly there were fame-chasers, charlatans and rip-off artists on all sides, but Wolfe lacks any generosity of spirit. Nobody, in his view, acts from good faith. It's very funny, and a lot of egos certainly needed puncturing, but Wolfe entirely lacks empathy for those on the receiving end of Jim Crow and all the horrors of COINTELPRO. It's just a racket for him. Next up: Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls, Sarah Davis's Goff's Last Ones Left Alive (an Irish feminist dystopian novel) and yet another Austen retelling: Janice Hadlow's The Other Bennet Sister (Mary, in this case). Kitty never gets a look-in. I'm also still reading Robert Frost, but confess to having had quite enough talk of ploughing.

I've read more than usual, I suppose - largely because I've spent what seems like days on delayed, diverted trains or on replacement buses. All in the name of moral duty - I went to a baptism a long way off and am now a godfather, the benighted child's parents having nowhere else to turn. I'm not sure I'm entirely equipped to oversee anyone's spiritual growth, but I've read Émile, so what could possibly go wrong?