Review of "Foster" by Claire Keegan

I came to this book with no expectations - I had somehow managed to avoid the hype around the author, though now I've read it everyone seems to know about it. Anyway it's a beautifully crafted short story, made into a small book with big font and lots of white space, about a young girl in rural Ireland, who is fostered out by her parents (informally, it seems) while the mother has a new baby. The main point seems to be how much she loves, and is cherished by, the foster parents. It's very simply written, but sensual and beautiful.

It put me in mind of my dad, who was evacuated to Biggleswade during the Second World War, and seems to have had a wonderful time. He remembered that the family to which he had been allocated bought him a bicycle for his birthday, and he never shared any memories of any such memories of his own family. Of course Dad never kept up with them after the war, though I think he may once have made a trip to Biggleswade.

Review of "Mr Love and Justice" by Colin MacInnes

I was vaguely aware of Colin MacInnes, but I'd never read any of his books - I did watch the 1986 film of Absolute Beginners with David Bowie, but I don't have a very strong memory of that.

I sort of assumed that it would be a very dated book, with old fashioned sexism and racism - but it's mainly not. There are some black and other foreign characters - Maltese gangsters, some Indians - but they aren't depicted as stereotypes. The main characters are all borderline proletarians - seamen, policemen, criminals, prostitutes and pimps.

It's set in the 1950s, and it's a very vivid evocation of a London that was just passing when I was a child - bombsites, street entertainers, sleazy pubs and strip joints.

Although the characters aren't educated or particularly articulate they are represented as having real and complex emotional lives, and though it's not really plot-driven the narrative is well structured - and it's only a little book, some 200 pages.

I note in passing that the characters are depicted as using working-class London speech, but some of the words don't feel right to me. Did English men call their girlfriends "chicks" in the 1950s?

Anyway, I liked it, and I think I'll read some more of MacInnes.

Review of "The Bible for Grown-Ups: A new look at the good book" by Simon Loveday

This arrived, un-ordered and without any note, in a delivery. Of course it was a present from my brother Leon, but I didn't realise that at first, so the mystery contributed to the appeal of the book.

It's not unfamiliar territory, for anyone who has read "Who Wrote The Bible" by Richard Elliott Friedman, but it's an easy read - and unlike that it goes into some of the textual history and background context of the New Testament, with which I was much less familiar. 

As I read it, though, I started to wonder...I'd often heard that we know such-and-such a book was written after another one, and I began to wonder how we know that. Loveday takes the known facts here for granted, and I'm still not entirely sure what the methodology for dating texts is. It's not like carbon dating, because we are not seeking to find how a particular example of a book is - we want to know how old the text itself is. Oddly, there are no Hebrew versions of the Torah older than the 10th century CE, though we know that the text is much older - the Septuagint is a Greek translation that was around in the second century BCE. The Wikipedia article on how texts are dated says "Dating the composition of the texts relies primarily on internal evidence, including direct references to historical events", which is not very enlightening. 

Review of Past Lives

A perfect example of how a film can be poignant without actually being sad. A girl emigrates with her family from Korea to Canada. They are well off creatives, so it's driven by opportunity, not desperation or politics. She's about twelve, and she has a same-age male friend, who she thinks she likes and might marry, but she leaves him behind in Korea. 

Twelve years later they find each other via Facebook, and re-develop the friendship as remote strangers. And twelve years after that he comes to visit, by which time she is married to a Jewish guy (like her, a writer)...and their meeting is poignant, about the lives that they might have had but didn't. 

For me it was emotional...I'm always affected by stories in which the arc of a life becomes visible...but not sad. It's not as if they could now get together, or even as if they would have had better lives if only...but the road not taken is still a visceral, live presence.

Watched via informal distribution and a USB stick in the back of the TV.

Review of Challengers

Two tennis films in as many weeks, and I don't even like tennis. I thought this one was pretty good, though critics don't seem to agree. Perhaps the gladiatorial one-to-one competition of tennis makes for better films than say team-sports games or athletics...team sports films are always about the gang learning to play as a team, but tennis is about the mind games and the psychological torture.

And some slightly unusual sex tropes in this one; the two young men both fancy the same woman, but really (or as well) they fancy each other - lots of hints about homoerotic attraction, which never become quite explicit.

Anyway, I enjoyed this - despite some odd choices of music to accompany the narrative. 

Watched via informal distribution and the USB slot at the back of the TV; unusually this is probably the first time a download has ever turned out to be a cam, so that at one point a head briefly travelled across the bottom of the screen. Worse, it was intercut with a lot of adverts for an online gambling service, which was really annoying. Still, you get what you pay for, and what you don't.

Review of Which Brings Me to You

A more or less standard romcom. A young man and woman meet at a wedding, go off to have sex in the cloakroom, but he wants to talk instead, so she rushes off. But then they meet up again later in the day, and over the next 24 hours tell each other all about their previous relationship disasters, so they end up bonding and...well, you can guess the rest, apart from the specifics of the bit where they almost split up but don't.

Based on a book, so perhaps better than some, and quite watchable.

Watched on Netflix.

The far right under wraps

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” So said Gramsci, and he might have been thinking about the strange conjuncture of the “Cosmic Right” - a blend of new age weirdness, alternative healing and wellness, and reactionary politics. 

Perhaps the seeds of this movement had been germinating out of sight for a while, but the first shoots became apparent with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. It began with “Stand in the park” protests against the lockdown restrictions, and soon there was a movement - or at least a series of Telegram channels and social media presences - with various names, including the Freedom Movement, the Sovereign Citizens Movement, the White Rose (named after the German resistance to the Nazis). 

And there was The Light, a free newspaper full of anti-vaccination misinformation, anxiety-inducing material about radio waves and surveillance by the state and big tech, and a ragbag of other conspiracy theories.

It’s hard to overstate how horrible The Light is. It contains sympathetic articles by and about figures from the traditional far right, like Anne Marie Waters of “For Britain” and “Pegida UK” - who in turn uses the paper as a platform to praise Tommy Robinson of the English Defence League. Another regular contributor is Niall McCrae, a former lecturer involved in far right organisation Hearts of Oak, with Tommy Robinson. McCrae has co-authored with Robin Tilbrook, the founder of the far right “English Democrats” party, originally known as the English National Party. There are articles in defence of Holocaust denial and supporting the genocidal antisemite Graham Hart. 

There’s homophobia and transphobia, and misinformation about sex education in schools. There are attacks on feminism, women’s equality, contraception and abortion rights, and the claim that there is a “war on masculinity”. 

And there is a relentless promotion of climate change denial and obfuscation, alongside attacks on environmentalists and especially on any restrictions on car use. 

The themes in the paper are picked up by an emerging street movement. There are rallies with speakers whose websites feature antisemitic material drawn from “The Protocols of The Elders of Zion” and conspiracy-laden accounts of the toothless United Nations sustainability initiative Agenda 2030. In towns across the UK, and now in Ireland, there are weekly stalls distributing the paper as well as other books and pamphlets. There is a strong presence in several towns in the South West, and the paper has been spotted in London and in towns in the North. 

Groups of protestors converged on Oxford to protest against traffic calming schemes and “Fifteen Minute Cities”, another well-intentioned town planning idea about localisation of services that is characterised as a plan to create urban ghettos in which citizens will be confined. A mob of ‘conspiraloons’ stormed a meeting of Glastonbury Town Council and then crowed that it had forced the administration - the equivalent of a parish council, with few powers - to abandon its non-existent plans for a fifteen-minute city.

What is this?

For some, this phenomenon is both unprecedented and confusing. Sure, the movement’s messages seem to come from the right, but its cultural style doesn’t. The people who hand out The Light look like hippies. The material often has an anti-corporate or Trump-style “workerist” slant to it, with lashings of libertarianism. In our little town of Stroud, where the movement has gained a foothold among wellness practitioners and some members of the Steiner community, the most prominent supporters are ex-socialists and environmental activists. Some continue to wear Jeremy Corbyn t-shirts and loudly profess themselves to be socialists. The Light’s editor (a flat-earther) began his involvement in politics as an anti-fracking campaigner. 

So a new description and analysis is proposed to explain what’s going on. Unsurprisingly some commentators revive the vapid “horseshoe theory”. Others have coined the term “diagonalism” to characterise the leftists who turn right, and this seems to have struck a chord in Germany (as Querdenker), where the pandemic and anti-vaxx activism created a steady pipeline from the Greens and Die Linke to the AfD.

Naomi Klein, in her recent perceptive book Doppelganger, prefers to talk about the “mirror world”, in which rightwing politicians pick up on areas of anxiety that the left has either ignored or lost its interest - technological surveillance, the failings of the medical-industrial complex, the capture of international organisations by mega-corporations, the hypocrisy of the liberal elite and its techno-fixes for profound systemic failures…

I’m not so sure that what we’re looking at is so unprecedented. When “classic” fascism first arrived, in Italy in the early 1920s, some people on the left were confused. Fascism was against traditional conservatives and institutions, against laissez faire and free market economics. It presented itself as a “third way”, modernising, beyond traditional conservatism and socialism, and it was in favour of a great deal of state direction of the economy and society - unlike traditional conservatives. 

Mussolini’s movement in Italy recruited syndicalists and anarchists as well as nationalists. Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was preceded by his “New Party” which attracted former members of the left-wing Independent Labour Party, and a few stayed the course with the later incarnation as fully fledged fascists. Despite his enthusiasm for the British Empire and colonial wars, Mosley was a campaigner for “peace” in the later 1930s, opposing any kind of confrontation with Europe’s Nazi and fascist regimes. Our new rightists are keen to advocate for peace with Putin.

In Germany there were so-called “Beefsteak Nazis”, allegedly brown on the outside but red on the inside. Fabians like George Bernard Shaw admired Mussolini’s hostility to Italy’s liberal institutions. Mainstream social democrats like Henri de Man in Belgium openly embraced fascism.

It’s a defining feature of the far right that it presents itself as against the system. Whereas the mainstream right says that the system is under threat and needs to be defended, the far right says that the system has already been conquered by those it defines as enemies, and it needs to be taken back so that the natural order of things can be restored. So they might be revolutionaries, but they want a revolution that will reimpose hierarchy and inequality.

This can get very weird. In the US the QAnon movement and its wider circle of alt-right militant Trump supporters, which talked a lot about the elites and the ‘deep state’, hoped for a military coup to restore the constitution and Trump to the presidency. It is quite alarming to see Free Alex Jones Tee-shirts on the High Street in Stroud.

So the far right will sometimes be hostile to the same things that the left opposes - but this doesn’t really mean that we share common ground. They are hostile to the banking system, but this hostility is grounded in a racialised understanding of financial institutions (“controlled by Jews”). They are hostile to the international organisations intended to ameliorate the worst aspects of capitalist chaos - not because they are too weak to do the job, but because they believe that these institutions are too strong and so impinge on the rights of nation-states and the free market. They are critical of the healthcare system, not because it's inadequate to meet the needs of the population but because it’s too powerful - and they don’t much like welfare or redistribution of any kind.

To be absolutely clear, I’m not saying that they are really classic fascists, and that all that’s needed is a Scooby-Doo type unmasking. 

The Light is part of a new kind of far right. It doesn’t look like old-style conservatives or fascists. It’s prepared for the internet age, but unlike recent conspiracism with rarely moved offline, has adherents prepared to spend several days a week handing out a paper in the cold, organising face to face meetings and rallies. Their ideas and rhetoric are much more like the US “libertarian” far right, opposed to state intervention and welfare, and in support of “freedom” for those with money and privileges. And although The Light and its supporters are not themselves fascists, the paper has a problematically cosy relationship with some actual fascists. 

It picks up supporters in strange places and funnels them towards far right politics. Many of them don’t realise that they are being funnelled, and don’t have the political background to see what is happening. It builds on seemingly innocuous campaigns such as ‘keep cash’, which offer gateways to conspiracy theories which only become evident when one looks further into the promoters, such as the campaign run by Debbbie Hicks in the Hayes and Harlington local elections. 

It’s possible that some of the most committed supporters don’t even realise this - hence the protestations that they are not far right, the Jeremy Corbyn T-shirts, the claims to be a left splinter group, and so on. It doesn’t matter what they think about this, what matters is what they do - and from that it’s clear that The Light is a phenomenon and a project of the far right. Its positions on LGBTQ people, refugees and migrants, and feminism (all attacked as ‘woke’ at best and part of a conspiracy to divide at worst), free speech for racists and antisemites, and climate change denial, should be enough to demonstrate this. 

It’s important not to be taken in by rhetoric that says we are “all on the same side”. However nice the people handing out the paper are, whatever they used to be, they are, wittingly or unwittingly, part of a project that’s aimed at building a far right movement.

The purpose of classic fascism was to defend capitalism against the labour and socialist movements - to smash workers’ organisations. It’s not entirely clear yet, but it looks to me like the primary purpose of this new far right is to defeat environmentalist organisations and protect a system based on the production and consumption of fossil fuels. 

Though Hope Not Hate have published a piece (written by our Stroud-based campaigning group) and referred to The Light and some other aspects of this phenomenon, and the 12 Rules for What podcast has also explored this issues in audio form and in their book, it’s disappointing that the main anti-fascist organisations don’t seem to be taking much notice. 

It’s easy to dismiss this new movement as just a bunch of cranks who will turn out to be mostly harmless. I think that’s wrong. Sure, they don’t look like the Nazis in 1933 - but they do look a lot like the way the Nazis looked in 1923, a mostly fringe group in funny outfits who believed in all sorts of occultist nonsense and were only picking up limited numbers of recruits and votes. We should be taking notice, and preparing to confront their ideas and their presence.

This article appeared in Jewish Socialist (Issue 79, Spring 2024)

Review of "Headlong" by Michael Frayn

I'd never read any Michael Frayn before, though I really enjoyed Copenhagen, and I feel that I've heard him on Radio 4, in the days when I used to listen to Radio 4.

This is a really well-written book about fraud and confidence trickery in the world of art. The main character and first-person narrator is a philosophy lecturer transitioning to art historian - his wife is an actual art historian, and the dynamic involved in that is less explored than it might have been. There's lots of brilliantly well observed stuff about city people with "places in the country" and how they are received by the rural people, and about dodgy money and family inheritances. There's some great historical context about the period of Breughel's life, and about the context in which he was painting, and about how fragmentary knowledge about art and works can be.

But I can't entirely say I enjoyed it, because of the all-pervading sense of dread that hangs over it. The first-person narrator is increasingly stupid as he gets deeper into the opportunity that he thinks has opened up before him, and it feels a bit like watching a slow-motion car crash - the reader can't help but know this is going to end badly, and there enough clues sprinkled through the text that it will too. So it's a bit miserable, because the narrator - unlike most of the other characters - is quite sympathetic.

Review of King Richard

A film about the father of Serena and Venus Williams (and about them too), and how we drives and manages their career.

I'm not usually a big fan of sports films. They are usually variations on the "determination will win through in the end" theme, and this one was sort of like that, but it did have some interesting twists - particularly the title character's wish for his girls to have more than one focus - education as well as tennis. It didn't soft-pedal the relationship difficulties in the household. It didn't make much of the racism that they faced - most of that is in reported speech, whereas we actually see Richard beaten up by young black criminal men.

Anyway, I enjoyed it more than I expected to, even though it was long - two and a half hours.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Runaway" by Alice Munro

A collection of short stories, each of which is amazing, emotionally demanding...hard to read them one after another, you need time to get over each of them. Like Greek tragedies, but also like real life in the way that they don't have a neat, complete arc. Sometimes it feels like too much happens in each of them, but it doesn't detract. I will definitely read more of Alice Munro.

Review of "Death in Ecstasy" by Ngaio Marsh

I'd never read any Ngaio Marsh before - I didn't even know who she was, or even that she was a woman. I picked this up from a book drop somewhere. I started off not liking it much. Its cast of posh Londoners put me in mind of Raymond Chandler's comment about country house murder mysteries. There are some gay (should that be "homosexual"?) characters who are depicted with contempt and revulsion. 

But it sort of grew on me. The setting - a weird neo-pagan cult in London, with a grifter "priest" and gullible toff congregation - was interesting, and the place descriptions were evocative. And though the few working-class characters are dreary stereotypes, the toffs are not at all sympathetic - they are stupid, duplicitous, drug addicts and drug pushers. It's sort of interesting to see the slightly impoverished lives that even moderately well-off people lived in London at that time, despite the presence of either personal or shared "service flat" servants.

Anyway, I ended up enjoying it more than I'd expected.