Crimea River

What can one possibly say in the face of this latest war that isn't impossibly trite or obvious? 'A plague on all your houses' is tempting, as is the old joke 'I wouldn't have started from here', because yesterday's attack on Ukraine is the result of miscalculation and cowardice on all sides for decades. 

There's a lot of chatter on the usual social media sites about useful idiots and infantile leftists, largely thanks to the Stop The War Coalition's preference for critiquing NATO rather than Russia, and the right's predilection for wilfully dumbing-down any criticism of Western governments and shouting treason. Some people are claiming that the attack on Ukraine is proof that Putin wants to re-establish the Soviet Union, which I think (channelling Zhou Enlai's apocryphal view of the French Revolution) is a misreading caused by a limited historical perspective. Instead, being a non-Stalinist old left-winger, I see the USSR as Tsarist Russia in modernised garb. The faces at the top changed, a few non-Russians were integrated into the leadership, but it was essentially the Russian-dominated empire under new management. While Putin is happy to appeal to the understandable ostalgie of citizens who remember not starving under the communists by downplaying the worst crimes of the Soviet regime, he's pretty consistently invoked the worldview of the Czars in all its autocratic pomp, particularly when it comes to how they viewed the near abroad (i.e. theirs). Putin isn't the General Secretary de nos jours; he's the Czar. 

While I'm embarrassed by the crudeness of the Stop the War & Cos. position, I do feel that the war, and Putin, are the creation and fault of the supposed democratic states. We've had 30-odd years of claiming that the West and democracy (not the same thing) won the cold war, but it's howlingly obvious to me at least that wasn't democracy that triumphed, it was capitalism. Other than the special case of Germany, the West made no effort to instil democracy in the former USSR. It imposed the most brutal forms of capitalism and made a tacit deal with the gangsters who emerged that the needs of their populations would come a very distant second to the energy and financial needs of the markets. The Chechens, the Georgians and a host of other democratically-inclined nations were abandoned; Russian people were left to destitution, drink and nostalgic fantasies, but oil and looted cash flowed out of Russia and into London, Frankfurt, Cyprus, the Virgin Islands, Switzerland and every other shady haven, no questions asked. No effort was made to establish states run by and for their populations. Every hungry oligarch and dictator was feted and fed to ensure that they didn't impede the flow of loot into Western banks, political parties, law firms, private schools and football clubs until one of them had the bad manners to get impatient. Doesn't Putin understand that economic violence is much more effective than the stuff with guns? Why invade a country when you can buy it piece by piece? It's embarrassing. Makes the global order look bad.  

No wonder the West's response is so compromised, embarrassing and evasive. The virtue signalling from all sides is unbearable. Here's what Steve Reed, the Labour MP posted on Twitter:

This, kids, is what we call bathos. The Kremlin's tacticians aren't recreating that scene in Downfall as news that Croydon stands with Ukraine filters through. Does Croydon really stand with Ukraine? What does that mean in practice? Still, at least Steve is just a backbench opposition MP who needs to sound tough. What of the actual British Prime Minister? Well, I took some time off work to watch his solemn address to the nation and came away pretty depressed. 7 minutes of utter vacuity no more meaningful than Steve's tweet. Nothing more than 'thoughts and prayers' - tough words without a single meaningful action attached. Cynical, in fact: rhetoric designed to persuade the voters that the UK government is actually doing something while very carefully not committing to doing anything at all. Johnson keeps saying that the UK will act in concert with other nations - perhaps being in some kind of supra-national union might have helped? What he actually means is that there's no way the other big nations will do anything so Britain won't have to either. It's not a promise, it's a loophole. Brexit has been a bonanza for the oligarchs and criminals the world over: Britain has become Europe's Macao, a lovely place with all the trappings of civilisation but without any of that pesky rule-of-law stuff, a safe haven for looted billions with no questions ever asked, thanks to state capture by a crowd of politicians who are far more interested in finance than democracy and rather envy the crude macho bluster of Trump, Putin and co. and are quite bored having to operate within the minimal guide rails of liberal democracy. 

The reason is obvious: Ukraine has no chance of winning this war without military help from outside and no country is going to provide it. I would have a lot more respect for the UK government if they honestly explained that Ukraine isn't important enough to go to war with Russia over - it's the double-talk that I can't stand. There's no meaningful action that the West can take that will change the course of events other than war, and that's not going to happen. Admitting this isn't an option so instead you get Johnson and his crew of compromised statesman cos-players throwing Churchillian shapes while wondering how this will affect the upcoming local election results. Ukrainians and Russian conscripts will die while we ponder confiscating the odd under-achieving football club and a couple of yachts (BP's Russian holdings will remain untouched) and our leaders will hope for a swift Russian victory they can present as an unfortunate fait accompli. The Ukrainians can appeal to us via heart-rending social media - the new asymmetric warfare - but they're collateral damage that the powerful countries can easily live with. 

The last British adventure in Ukraine resulted in the Charge of the Light Brigade (spoiler: massive away loss, a mediocre poem and an iffy Doctor Who episode); Johnson, Truss, Tugendhat and the rest of this ghastly crew is more the Charge of the Shite Brigade. Lightweight, tactical, cynical and pointless. Being a product of empire myself I've never put the slightest faith in the much vaunted idea of Britain being a credible force for good in the world (where might Putin have got the idea for 'protecting' an embattled minority against anti-imperialist splitters, in the centenary year of the foundation of Northern Ireland?), but the obvious post-Brexit marginalisation of the UK would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. 

Anyway, enough of My Two Cents. While all this has been going on I've read some books, between to a funeral, bought more books, done a lot of marking, watched this government legislate to abolish universities like mine and fumed that not enough of my colleagues voted to strike alongside our counterparts in 68 other universities, and went to an online dramatisation of the life of novelist Amy Dillwyn, the Welsh Ann Lister. 

Après-moi, le deluge

I'm going to resist the temptation to comment on the benighted and depressing farce that constitutes British politics/economics/public life - you can follow me on Twitter for that. 

The big news is that I've finished my marking! In reality, this means that I still have to negotiate the complexities of our newly-secure and thus unusable VLE and inevitably discover a load of hidden essays at the last minute, but I'm going to enjoy a day or two of denial. It helps that the standard has been really high: the kids emerged from lockdown with amazing enthusiasm and have produced hugely impressive work. I've also done a couple of events for the city's literature festival - a conversation with Paul Mason on his new book How To Stop Fascism and a conversation between four crime writers (Holly Seddon, Mark Edwards, Sharon Dempsey and Brian McGilloway) on genre, craft and literary snobbery). All good fun, but between those and the thrill of the Six Nations, I was too exhausted to attend anything for fun, which was a shame. 

I did manage to sneak in a bit of reading. Top of the list was the English translation/adaptation of Manon Steffan Ros's hit post-apocalypse YA novel Llyfr Glas Nebo which follows in the tradition of Meg Rosoff's How We Live Now. The original book is beautiful, written in an idiosyncratic version of the North Welsh dialect, swapping voices between the Welsh of a mother whose Welsh was always present but tentative, and a boy whose Welsh is largely learned from books in the absence of any kind of community. Even for a learner like me it was hugely effective. One aspect that really worked was the novel's concern with other literature (much like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home): the isolated family learn their world through looted books. Rowenna largely sticks to middlebrow English literature and Welsh novels for teenagers and learners, while her son races through the Bible and a huge number of Welsh-language novels and poetry collections. The English translation, The Blue Book of Nebo  (by the author) is moving and hugely successful but the literary landscape is different: the reader can't be expected to pick up on the significance of the Welsh texts referred to (even starting with the book's title. Some of the names have been changed too, perhaps to make reading easier for people unfamiliar with Welsh names, therefore substituting one set of cultural echoes for another. The boy, Siôn, becomes Dylan while his short-lived sister Dwynwen is now Mona, for example.

Anyway, read it: it's short because it doesn't need to be long; it's an intense exploration of mother-child relationships, and it's beautifully written in either language. 

Unlike, I'm sad to say, the other collapse novel I read this week: Kim Stanley Robinson's cli-fi doorstop The Ministry for the Future whose cover blazons the claim 'Obama's Favourite Book of 2021'. I am a KSR fan, having enjoyed many of his previous novels and sharing his clear and heartfelt fear that nationalism and capitalism are determined to resist doing the necessary to avoid environmental disaster. This novel just didn't work for me. It alternates between following the Irish head of the UN environmental body of the title as she tries to avert disaster, the voices of multiple protagonists (farmers, victims of climate change, eco-terrorists etc.) and mini-chapters taking different discursive forms explaining the science, economics politics and so on. It puts the case for optimism without convincingly justifying it (though I liked the idea of home-made Semtex-bearing drones being employed to make private jet use suicidal), and the wide sweep made it hard to sustain the traditional person-centred novel form. It's a (much-needed) novel of ideas really, like Cory Doctorow's badly-written but fascinating work. KSR is a much better writer than Doctorow, but this novel just felt too clunky despite its good intentions and scientific accuracy. Still worth reading, but a bit of an effort. 

I'm off to my godmother's funeral early next week and have some external examine work to do, so research and reading might take a bit of a back seat, but no doubt more marking will rise from the depths like a misanthropic shark…

Some recent reading

The more work I have, the more books I read for pleasure. This doesn't alleviate any stress or help me sleep any better, but I'm not particularly inclined to do anything about it. What I must do is shelve the recently-read pile as it's currently a health-and-safety issue. 

I've mentioned the ones down in the lower strata already, but in case you're thinking of getting any of those at the top, a quick summary (click on the picture to enlarge it). 

Patricia Lockwood, Nobody Is Talking About This. I like her poetry, her cat tweets, and found her memoir Priestdaddy compelling, hilarious and horrifying. I struggled with Nobody a little though, despite being nearly as 'extremely online' as she is. At heart it's quite an old-fashioned moral tale (not that there's anything wrong with this). The protagonist, whose life closely shadows the author's, finds that being extremely online is exciting, confusing, shallow, overly-judgmental, random and disorienting, damaging her ability to establish stable or deep relationships with people IRL. Then the birth and death of her disabled niece teaches her that genuine and altruistic emotional connections are still available, and the child's brief existence gives her a sense of perspective with regards to the Twittersphere (sorry, 'the portal'). Some of it is really funny, some is moving, but I couldn't decide whether the tone was deliberately shallow and mawkish to represent the supposed discursive effect of being always online, or whether it's sincerely artless. I'm also torn between reading this as an autobiographical work and therefore respecting the author's grief and loss, and reading it as fiction in which case it's another dead-baby-for-instant-pathos piece. I know this makes me sound very callous indeed but didn't we agree after John Green that children+terminal disease = sales/awards is a cynical ploy (see also Wilde's response to the death of Little Nell, who despite being fictional is buried not far from here)? If we're meant to read Nobody as a work of fiction, the 'message' is that a child's death proves that social media are ephemeral in comparison. Well, a) we should be able to work that out anyway and b) while social media posts may individually be insubstantial, the collective whole has had a profound effect on emotion, human interaction, politics, violence and any number of areas of human behaviour. Finally: what about those of us who don't have even healthy children available to remind us of what's valuable? Are we condemned to a life of sterile frivolity? Seems a bit essentialist…

Next book down is Connie Willis's Crosstalk, a romantic speculative fiction comedy which also expresses concern with the emotional impact of excessive social media. Our heroine works in a Silicon Valley phone company which is developing the future of communication: emotional and eventually conversational telepathy. The point of the novel is that our thoughts and feelings are much less coherent and pleasant than what we choose to convey, and that unfiltered access even to one's lovers' thoughts might be a Bad Idea. Absolutely fine, totally agree. But. But but but but but. The mechanism by which we arrive at this revelation is that genuine telepathy is a gift retained only by the pure Irish: those who haven't interbred with all and sundry. Obviously the idea of unadulterated peoples is historical and scientific nonsense that shouldn't be entertained even in a light-hearted rom-com. Then there's the literary effect: terrible. Our heroine is Bridget because of course it is (today is Lá Fhéile Bride btw) and of course she has red hair. She is Irish-American and her entire family are garrulous, Catholic, interfering, speak in the worst cod-Irish nonsense ('ould sod, 'children'), eat soda bread and potatoes all day and Bridget is constantly called Briddey which never happens. Bridey maybe, Bríd definitely but not Briddey. I think most of Connie Willis's novels are absolutely wonderful but this one just didn't work. Maybe, as an African-American author, her dreadful version of Irishness is a satirical comment on white authors' embarrassing representations of African-Americans, but maybe it's just bad, bad writing. 

Underneath Crosstalk is volume 2 of Ngaio Marsh's 1930s-40s Inspector Alleyn novels - I'm buying one volume every few months until I've worked my way through them. Alleyn himself, sidekick Sergeant Fox and Watson journalist Nigel Bathgate aren't that interesting - identikit gentleman policeman, working-class subordinate and slumming hack, but the plots are compelling and darker than many of her peers. Marsh also has a gift for brief, piercing description and metaphor which makes me pause and admire. The settings may sometimes be the country house but even when it is, she does something different with it, and she ranges further and wider than most, though theatres seem to be her favourite venue for murder. There's also a sense that she moves with the times more readily than some of the more formulaic detective writers: her crimes emerge from the depths of damaged groups and societies responding to war, hardship or simply change. 

I'm sure I've mentioned the other books in the pile before, so I won't bore you further other than to list them, and to mention Lindsay Clarke's The Chemical Wedding which I borrowed - I'd never heard of him or this 1987 Whitbread Prize-winning novel, but it's a fascinating cocktail of Cold War fear, Possession-style switching between present-day characters and mystical ancestors with a dash of magical realism. Absolutely entrancing. 

Mary Gentle, Ash: magnificent feminist medieval fantasy with echoes of Byatt's Possession. Maybe 300 pages too long. 

Tove Jansson's Art and Pictures: obviously wonderful. 

Martin Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts - good history of British fascism, the treason of the Nazi-loving aristocracy and of course the Daily Mail's role in promoting fascism, which it hasn't yet given up on. 

Simon Ings, The Smoke - well-written SF with some pointed political ideas. 

G Compton, Farewell Earth's Bliss: good old-fashioned SF. 

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and other works: one of the earliest novels, by a woman and addressing the slave trade. Pioneering and troubling. 

Nina Allan, The Race: enjoyable speculative fiction set in a degraded, declining Britain. So not very speculative really. 

Jo Walton, Lent: I'm a huge fan of Walton's work: she's interested in philosophy, knows her history and writes beautifully across a range of genres. This one shares territory with Adam Roberts' recent literary explorations of philosophical positions with monsters, though his thing is Kant and her's is neo-Platonism.

Michael Arlen, These Charming People: a collection of 1930s short stories by a nearly-forgotten author. The best ones remind me of Katherine Mansfield in tone and quality, but too many of them are slight or rely on a single point or gag. 

Anita Brookner, Providence: reminded me why even though she writes pretty much the same novel every time, they're all worth reading. A single sentence of Brookner is worth a whole novel of other authors. 

Anthony Buckeridge, Jennings at Large: a curiosity, a real time warp of a comic boarding-school novel, but charming throughout. 

Ariosto, Orlando Furioso: utterly bonkers 16th-century epic but also thrilling and wonderful, even in prose translation. My favourite bit was when St John takes one of our heroes to the moon to retrieve Orlando's brain from the pile stored up there.  

Thurber and White, Is Sex Necessary?: some good though dated gags but ultimately a little wearing. I don't think it will stand up to much re-reading. 

Mantel, The Mirror and the Light: admirable for the scale, which gives her the space for the minutest subtle characterisation and implication. We all know what's going to happen - the art is in the way she depicts the sudden reversals experienced by and the self-deception practised by pretty much every character. 

More, Bacon, Neville, Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More's is the most substantial and well-known, but Bacon and Neville's are fascinating too, though lacking More's mordant humour. 

Lethem, The Arrest: post-modern SF humour. Good fun but I wondered in the end what it was for. 

Tom Gauld, The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess: aimed at 5 year-olds so the plot is simple and affecting, and the illustration is as always beautiful. 

Sally Vickers, Miss Garnet's Angel - a fine addition to the English-in-Venice and emotional-scales-falling-away-late-in-life subgenres

Chips Channon's diaries vol. 1: a monster. All-too-familiar tale in his own unapologetic, unreflective words of the dark heart of the ruling classes. 

Ben Aaronovitch's False Value is the latest in his weird-police series, which I enjoy enormously though it's showing signs of wear. The same goes for Jasper Fforde's latest (not pictured), The Constant Rabbit - highly enjoyable and politically urgent, but it feels like the last gasp of the comic novel. 

I reviewed Stevie Davies' The Party Wall and Angela Graham's A City Burning in Planet a few months ago. I liked Graham's book immediately but felt that Davies - one of my absolute favourite authors - had come a cropper trying genre fiction with The Party Wall. I feel the need to revise that somewhat: months later I'm still thinking about her central protagonist, the ultimate in toxic masculinity. I'm still not convinced by the plotting, but her description of banal male evil is genuinely haunting. 

Uncle Tom's Cabin, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Dorian Grey and Moll Flanders were on a module I taught recently - all worth revisiting, obviously.