Review of "Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War" by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami

This is a detailed, principled, engaged and informative book about the Syrian Civil War.  I'd been aware for some time that I had a muddled and not entirely thought out position about the Syrian revolution. I'd managed to pick up that it had started out as one of the later uprisings inspired by the Arab Spring wave, and that it had degenerated into a brutal militarised civil war in which no-one seemed to be the good guys. 

Assad was clearly a bad guy, leading a nasty one-party militarised regime with torture chambers and mass disappearances. But at least some of the opposition seemed to be bad-guy Islamists, and then Assad seemed to be fighting against ISIS, which turned Islamism into a death cult. And the Russians were helping their client, Assad's regime against ISIS, and the West (well, Britain and America) seemed to want to help him too - given the track record of western interventions in Middle Eastern revolutions being against that, as were the Stop the War Campaign seemed like a good idea, and I stood on a street corner with some lefties holding "Don't Bomb Syria" signs.

Well, after reading the book I am much better informed, though I'm not sure how much wiser I am. I understand better that some of the people I thought of as Islamists were not so bad, and that some of them had a commitment to religious pluralism and civil society...lots of Syria's revolutionaries talk about "freedom", but few seem to articulate a vision about what they are fighting for.

But others in the anti-Assad camp really were pretty nasty. The Al Nusra front, which is the local Al Qaeda franchise, sometimes seems to get an unnecessarily easy ride in the book. The information about how awful it is, is reported honestly in the book, but it doesn't seem to reach a compelling narrative. The book is not nearly as warm towards the various Kurdish factions and parties, and the Rojava project, as the only other book I'd read on the subject. Actually that was a bit of a relief, because the supporters of the PYD and the YPG that I'd met on demonstrations in London had more than a whiff of a cult about them.

Elsewhere I missed some bits of narrative. The Syrian Communist Party, that ought to have been engaged in a struggle against the regime, was hopelessly co-opted by it, because Syria and the regime were Soviet clients. Even the fall of the Soviet Union doesn't seem to have disturbed this. And a small part of the book's critique of Assad (both Assads, actually) is that they weren't as anti-Zionist as they made out. There is a part of me that thinks there is another story here, about the role of anti-Zionism as an "escape valve" and as an acceptable form of anti-imperialism across the entire Arab world, that no-one really wants to think about.

So I still don't really feel like I understand the Syrian conflict properly. I am aware that here, more than anywhere else, there are powerful forces at work seeking to ensure that I don't understand it. People who I have always trusted, like Noam Chomsky, and Seymour Hersch, and John Pilger, seem to have defended or whitewashed the Assad regime out of some bizarre "campist" motive. Places that I would normally go for information aren't at all reliable. 

I'm really lucky to have met Rami, a young Syrian activist refugee living in Stroud; I feel like I can trust his narrative and his experiences, not least because he's so open about where it has turned out that he was wrong about something. Reading the book I had some idea as to what he's been through, and it was worth it for that.

Review of For Sama

A film about the Syrian revolution and civil war, mainly about the siege of Aleppo, as seen through the eyes of a young woman citizen journalist, who documents the siege from the inside. I learned a lot about the horror of being starved and bombed, but not very much about the politics of the revolution. Part way through the film the journalist-woman starts wearing a hijab, but this is not discussed or even commented on. It's not clear at all from the film who the opposition are or what they are fighting for. 

Reading the Wikipedia article about the siege I feel not much wiser, even though I am now better informed. This is part of what it feels like to be living in a post-truth age, where there are no reliable sources of information about anything, and engaging with any aspect of international politics feels like an enormous effort. The article says that both sides used chemical weapons - do I find this plausible? I don't think so, but there is enough doubt in my mind to not know for sure. I know that the Assad regime is monstrous, but I am not at all sure that what the opposition became turned out to be very different.  

Films that focus on the experience on the ground, without any of the background or political context, become an exercise in emotional manipulation. I was put in mind of the film about the Kyiv uprising, Winter on Fire. Watching that I thought I was being played, and that's my ultimate conclusion about this too.

Review of Phantom of the Open

A film about golf turns out to be boring and depressing...who would have thought it? 

This is a biopic of Maurice Flitcroft, a working-class man from Barrow-in-Furness who decides to take up golf. It's a middle-class sport, and he's not at all good at it, but he pushes himself forward to compete in the British Open. 

It's got all the usual "plucky underdog" themes going on, and the very British celebration of people who keep going even though they aren't very good. Think Eddie the Eagle, or even Cool Runnings, even though that's about Jamaicans. 

The film is from 2021 but it looks like it was made in the 1970s, gloomy and with bleached out colours. There's some stuff about class in it - none of it very profound; sometimes the film seems to be laughing at Flitcroft and his working-class manners, not with him. 

There is a spot in the last 30 minutes that is slightly better, with a bit of focus on family dynamics and whether Flitcroft's obsession with pursuing your dream no matter what is really good advice (his twin sons aim to become disco dancing champions, but the international competitions in which they take part falter and fade). But this moment doesn't last long, and soon slides into more sentimentality and triumph-over-adversity stuff.

What was Mark Rylance thinking?

This was on BBC iPlayer but I couldn't find it, so we watched it via informal distribution. That may have further detracted, because the sound was really low.

Review of "Middle England" by Jonathan Coe

How can a book be so well-crafted, and have such a good narrative and great characters, and yet be so un-enjoyable?  Jonathan Coe, who I generally love, has written the Great Brexit novel, covering the period before and after the referendum, from the perspective of a group of mainly middle-aged, middle-class people.  Some of them are the characters from his previous two novels, The Rotters Club and The Closed Circle, but there are some new people too.

Some of the misery comes from the bits of the novel that don't work so well - some of the "funny" bits, like Benjamin's sex scene in the wardrobe with teen crush Jennifer, are both implausible and not very funny. At other times the attempts at "balance", such as Sophie's persecution by the forces of Political Correctness, don't feel all that convincing.

But mainly it's the good parts that make it so awful to read. It's like reliving the Brexit nightmare all over again, the awful debates, the vicious effectiveness of the Leave campaign vs the hapless, rambling, arrogant and patronising Remain campaign. And yeah, a lot of Remain supporters had no idea that it was even going to be close (let alone that they were going to lose) because they lived in a bubble. And this books lets us see outside our bubble, and into the minds and values of the other side. And still, eight years on, that's not pretty.

And yes, as Coe and his characters say, Brexit really did fuck the country over, and it might not recover in my lifetime, and that's not an enjoyable thought either.

Review of 1917

Straightforward war mission film about a couple of young soldiers who have to take a message across no-man's land to prevent a colonel sending his men into a prepared German trap. Lots of cameos by great British actors, some impressive design and battle scenes, but it all adds up to a film that is tense without being interesting. Maybe I don't actually like war films after all.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Music: A Very Short Introduction" by Nicholas Cook

 

I really liked this...it's not really an introduction to music so much as an introduction of how people think about music...maybe a short introduction to "musicology", but who would buy that?

Anyway, it was really enjoyable, and set out lots of good stuff about the role of the canon of western music, performance culture, the status of performers vs composers, and so on.

I'd like to read the next level up (or down?) about this, but wonder if there is such a book.

Review of "Rules of Civility" by Amor Towles

This felt a bit of a guilty pleasure - a celebration of Depression-era New York City, with lots of outrageously wealthy people having a great time going to Jazz bars and drinking endless cocktails in swanky hotels and restaurants. There's a bit of a plot but it's not really essential to the enjoyment, and I did get a little confused between the rich people.

But it was enjoyable, even though I think it's one of Towles's books that has been resurrected after the more successful and better later ones. 

Interesting that it's told in first person narrator, though that narrator is a young working class woman of Russian Orthodox extraction. Glad that he ignored the "write from experience" advice, because it seems to me like he made a good job of it.

Review of Food for Ravens

Biopic of Nye Bevan, made in 1997, with a confusing narrative structure (the ailing Bevan meets and talks to his younger self, among others). There's no depiction of him as a fiery socialist, only of the old man remembering this. So it's slow, and a bit dull really. Heart in the right place, but not very interesting.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of "Small Things Like These" by Claire Keegan

Wow, a small book but a very powerful one. Told in close third person with a central character who is a small town coal merchant, who stumbles into the abuse that is going on at the local convent as part of the Magdalen laundries story. 

It's really well told, not long on horrible graphic details, and more focused on the way in which everyone in a small town can choose not to see what is happening around them. And it's the small details, picked out with a sharp eye by Claire Keegan, that bring this to life.

I know it's not at all the same, but it made me think about the people who turned a blind eye to the Holocaust as it unfolded around them.

Review of "Piranesi" by Suzanna Clarke

A much better book than "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell". It's shorter, and better written, and the not-entirely elaborated idea is more interesting. It's very visual and evocative, and sensual. It's mainly set in a parallel universe made up entirely of an enormous building with many huge halls and staircases, in which a tidal sea is present.

She doesn't really explain why the first person narrator is called Piranesi - it's a name one of the other characters gives to him - but it actually does quite a lot of descriptive work, suggesting the vast, mysterious and gloomy spaces of that artist's work.

It's still a bit flabby at the beginning - it felt like it took too long to get going, but by about a third of the way in she absolutely had me. 

Odd personal connection is that a lot of it involves people at Manchester University in the early 1980s, where I was studying. If the people in the novel had been real I probably would have known them.