Review of "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt

 

I was drawn in to this story about a group of over-privileged white kids at a posh and slightly useless American college...the narrator has got in on a scholarship so he's not so over-privileged, but he's pretending that he's as rich as the rest of them. The secret of the title is about some terrible things that they do, and I won't spoil by disclosing...I was captivated for the most part, even as I was repelled by the characters and what they'd done. But it rather falls apart in the last fifty pages. It felt to me like she'd got bored with them and it, which can't possibly be right because it shows all the signs of being put together and revised over a long period, and she is a really good write. But still, that's how it felt.

Review of Olga

Film about Olga, a young woman athlete who is on verge of being selected for the Ukraine national gymnastics team, but gets the opportunity to take out Swiss nationality and train in Switzerland instead - her now-dead dad was Swiss. Her mum is an investigative journalist exposing corruption in the government and we see her survive an assassination attempt while she's taking her daughter out for an evening. Olga goes to Switzerland, becomes Swiss, but is then transfigured by the unfolding political crisis in her home country and doesn't know where she belongs any more. Lots of hard-to-watch gymnastic training.

Watched at Lansdown Film Club, and I knew it was good because I forgot about how uncomfortable the seats were.

Review of The Field

Amazing, clever, emotionally laden Irish film about conflict over the ownership of a field in a poverty-stricken rural village. Bull McCabe, the farmer who has worked the field for all of his life even though he rents it from a widow in the village, wants to buy it for what he considers a fair price, but a visiting American has more cash and is determined to buy it himself. Lots of overlaying tragedy in the relationships between the farmer and his wife, and with his son, played by a younger Sean Bean. 

I think it's set in the 1930s, though it's not easy to tell. It might be the 1950s. Electricity has just arrived in the village...there is nothing else technological, and no reference to outside events, that might help to place the exact time. But the Famine is still a living memory and source of pain. There's a really strange ambivalent attitude to those who emigrated and left their land...are they traitors or victims? Similarly the tinkers who are in the village are regarded as having lost 'caste' because they are the descendants of people who abandoned their land.

I was slightly put off at the beginning by the murkiness of the colours, but I came to realise that anything else would have been wrong. It's a dark film and needs to be dark visually. This is like a Greek tragedy, but with protagonists who are poor.

We watched this at a community arts centre in Kenmare, a tiny town in the west of Ireland, where villages like the one depicted are all around, at a free showing by a community group that provided meals on wheels to the poor and isolated. There was free tea and cake too...we made a donation that was not expected and received with much thanks.

Review of Riders of Justice

Strange genre-crossing Danish film, which switches between philosophical considerations (the meaning of events and the chain of causality in particular), slapstick comedy, violent action thriller, parent-child relationships...and that's not even all of it. A Danish special forces veteran serving in what looks like Afghanistan hears that his wife has died in an apparently meaningless subway accident, but a geeky statistician who was present appears to tell him that it was not an accident after all. With the help of the statistician and his even more geeky friends the veteran seeks to take revenge on those he believes responsible...

It's not really possible to tell write any more without spoiling this film, and it's really worth watching. Despite the violence it's really thoughtful and interesting.

Watched via informal distribution.

A review of "Pigtopia" by Kitty Fitzgerald

A really unusual book, with a slightly fantastical but also gritty subject and setting - a birth-deformed young man abused by his disabled mother who finds solace in the company of pigs that he steals and breeds in a secret hideaway. Two narrators, the young man and the introverted young girl whose company he seeks, with different styles.

It reminded me a bit of Elmet, in the juxtaposition of the off-grid underclass and the appreciation of nature - as well as the violence, though in this book it's more of an undertone most of the time. 

I can't say much more without spoiling, but this was a good read. 

Review of "A Long Petal of The Sea" by Isabel Allende

Sickbed reading, and very suitable - interesting without being too emotionally taxing, despite the subject matter. A good family saga, well told, covering some terrible events (the fall of the Spanish Republic, the abysmal treatment of Republican refugees in France, the coup in Chile) via some characters who manage to live through all of this. The characters themselves are engaging, and there are some nice plot twists and devices to maintain interest. The title is from a Neruda poem, and though I've always known he was a good sort I've never read any of him - I plan to now.

I enjoyed this more than other recent works by her - this doesn't have any magical realism, which these days I find a bit of a bore.

Small personal note - I have stayed in Argeles-Sur-Mer, the town on the French Mediterranean coast where the Republican prisoners were interned. Even in the Summer, and even on holiday and staying in a nice house, it wasn't enjoyable; the wind blows sharp sand into your face all the time.

Review of "The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and The Far Right" by Sam Moore and Alex Roberts

The first thing to say is that this is a brilliant book...even better than their other book "The Post Internet Far Right", which was also great. It's not long, but it is very dense, with lots of links and footnotes, and lots of examples...many of which were derived from things that I had never heard of, even in the historical sections (and I'm quite well informed about the history of fascist and proto-fascist movements)...I'd never heard of Henry Dorgères or his French "Greenshirt" movement, to cite just one. The history section, which forms Chapter 1, is really good and would more or less work as a standalone piece; it's better than other things that I've seen before which more or less say there used to be environmentalists who were fascists, and the Green movement has skeletons in its cupboard and so on...this addresses the contradictions of fascist nature-loving, the Nazis's biodynamic farms alongside the massive program of autobahn-building and their need for cheap food.

Chapter 2 looks at the far right and nature now - how the climate crisis provides new opportunities for the far right. On the one hand climate breakdown, and its consequences, can be used by the far right to justify their programs and policies - a tighter grip on immigration and harsher policies against refugees. Conversely the far can also use opposition to climate mitigation methods as mobilising tool - either in terms of denialism ("climate change is a hoax being used to take away our freedoms") or a sort of Poujadist non-denial denialism ("all these green policies are too expensive and it's ordinary people who have to pay for them, not the liberal elite").

Chapter 3, which is slimmer, addresses the online far right ecologism, a peer into the cesspool of what they will say when they think they are anonymous or untraceable, with a much greater to misogyny, homophobia and murderous Social Darwinism.

Chapter 4 is about ecofascist terrorism, with a closer look at where the far right goes when it doesn't care how it looks to others - including the role of appeals to nature in the manifestos of fascist shooters and terrorists, the so-called "black-pilled".

And Chapter 5 looks forward into a future in which national and global politics will be dominated by climate chaos - in which science, and technology, and the political choices associated with them, will be ever more contested and fragmentary. They sketch out future responses, including: 

• "fossilized denialism", essentially the Trumpist postponement of effective mitigation measures while there's still money to be made from oil reserves; 
•  "batteries bombs and borders" - the search for technological and political fixes to address the climate while leaving the current distribution of wealth and power intact, including fighting multiple small wars for newly important resources alongside the militarisation of mitigation and adaption measures. Pretty much what we are being offered by Silicon Valley, Biden, and even the World Economic Forum.
• "climate collapse cults", a more thoroughly fascist response to the multiple crises, which will include, at least in rhetoric if not in practice, far right breakaway sub-states and communities, and more fantasies of violence.

The last of these offers the prospect for a return to actual fascism...most of the time the authors are careful to distinguish between that and other far right forms. Actual militarised fascist street movements and parties are for the most part pretty rare at the moment, but they might become a bigger part of a far right response as the climate crises worsen.

Review of Rye Lane

A really funny, enjoyable, clever romcom. Great to look at, witty, cool. It's a romcom so the plot is never going to be very sophisticated, but it's good enough with a few unexpected twists. It's a very London film, but it's almost all shot in the bits of London that rarely make it into mainstream films - Brixton and Peckham, not Notting Hill or Primrose Hill...there is a bit of South Bank and Tate Modern at the end, but I will let that go.

Good diverse characters - the leads are both young Black people, and it's not a film about racism.

Just watch, it's nice, you won't be disappointed.

Watched via laptop, HDMI cable and informal distribution.

Review of "Pirate Enlightenment or the real Libertalia" by David Graeber

I begin this review with some unease...some years ago I wrote a review of one of David Graeber's other books (I think it was "The Utopia of Rules", and although it was a generally enthusiastic review (because I really do like his work) there was one slightly negative comment - and the great man took the time to write a full and damning response setting out why my slight showed how stupid I was. This made me like him slightly less, even though I still think his work is great. But he's dead now, so I should be fairly safe...though it rather begs the question as to how he can be so prolific after his demise.

I think the answer is that this is the remains of an unpublished older work, containing elements from academic papers (perhaps themselves unpublished) bolted together to make a book by a dead person. It's pretty enjoyable, but not quite right. In the preface he says it grew out of a long essay, and maybe it should have stayed one...or maybe it should have become a longer book setting out more of the context for a general reader like me. Reading "The Many Headed Hydra" I got a feeling for the role of the Atlantic in the C17th emerging economy of racial capitalism. This book focuses on the Indian Ocean and its role in a different colonial network, and I didn't know anything about that...the book seems to me to assume that I did. So a longer book would have included stuff about that, and the role of all the different actors who briefly stroll across the stage, from Armenian merchants to the French to the Dutch to translocated Caribbean pirates...

It also touches on what might be called the influence of non-Europeans on the European enlightenment, but that goes by in a flash too...on the other hand there's lots of detailed stuff about relationships between different groups in Madagascar, and I found some of that hard to follow.

Overall this was an enjoyable book with some benefits for a general reader, but I suspect it might have been better as a series of academic papers. Or a different bigger book for a general reader.

Review of "Number 9 Dream" by David Mitchell

It's really annoying that there are two David Mitchells, the author and the comedian. It's even more annoying that they are both so talented, especially the author, who has written a lot of good books and only a few duff ones.

This is an early work but really good - it's set in quite-modern Japan, with a Japanese protagonist (is he an otaku?) and only Japanese character. It acknowledges a bit of a debt to Haruki Murakami, but it reads to me as an authentically Japanese novel. It's sometimes a bit surreal and fantastical, and the style varies between sections, but in a good way. It's a novel with a quest, and coming of age, and in between there are some fantasy sections and a gritty violent yakuza story. 

It's pretty great, read it.

Review of Elvis

Really rather good biopic, which foregrounds but does not demonise the figure of Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis's manager who took 50% of everything that he earned.

Elvis comes out rather well...anti-racist, though not political or public about it, and rather more talented musically than I'd recognised. Elvis died at 42 when I was 19 and I barely marked it - I thought of him as a washed-up has-been playing a kind of music that I didn't think much of or about. 

It's a Baz Luhrmann film so lush and very colourful, but quite inventive in the shooting, cutting and editing. 

Parker is at least as much the focus of the film as Elvis, and he's a complex figure. The film says Elvis never toured abroad because Parker didn't have a passport, or indeed any legal identity at all. Oddly the colonel title seems to have been the only thing about him that was genuine...the colonelcy was bestowed upon him in 1948 by Jimmie Davis, the crooning governor of Louisiana. Jimmie Davis was a racist and a segregationist, btw, so perhaps the colonel didn't share Elvis's feelings about Black people.

Watched on TV via HDMI cable to laptop and informal distribution.

Review of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever:

What a wasted opportunity! The first fifteen minutes are great - views of the prosperous and beautiful fictional African country, a great anti-colonial scene in the UN, and it seems that this is going to be the Afrocentric, Afrofuturist film that I've been waiting for. And then just superhero trash...two and a half hours of things crashing into each other and people hitting each other, mostly to no purpose.

Which is a shame, because somewhere in there might be a good film struggling to get out. No, not really, just a good art director looking for a good film to work on. 

It's made worse by the fact that the two different groups of non-white anti-colonial people in the film, the Wakandans and the crypto-Mayan water people, are locked in an unnecessary war over...well, I'm not really sure. They ought to be fighting the extractive imperialists, and they both know this, but something about honour...so not only are the mass battle scenes tedious, but the viewer doesn't even want one side or the other to win. In that sense it's worse than Star Wars, where at least the baddies are clearly defined.

I realise how much superhero stuff is about the use of physical force and weaponry, sometimes high-tech weaponry, to overcome over-confident enemies. Perhaps this speaks to the fears and fantasies of ground-down teenage boys, or the inner teenage boy of so many grown-up men. I find this depressing to watch and rather sad.

Watched in two tranches, because it was too much to sit through. Ruth gave up at the half way mark and I watched some more, and then finished it a few days later. On the big screen at Springhill, following informal distribution.

Kasatchok!

For years the Red Band in London, and then the Stroud Red Band, played a tune called Kasatchok. It's a Russian traditional dance tune, or so I thought. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine we stopped playing it, not because we're boycotting everything that ever was Russian, but it didn't feel too good. Someone pointed out that a kasatchok was also a Ukrainian dance; did that make it better? Did the fact that it was a Ukrainian cossack dance make it worse again? After all fear and hatred of cossacks in part of Jewish folk-memory; my dad told me that in the 43 Group they used to call the mounted police in London "cossacks".

Then a friend reminded me that there are Italian words to the tune, which became a song of the Italian partisan resistance to the Nazis - Fischia il Vento. With that name it was programmed into a little electric keyboard that his child has. Here is a nice version by the Modena City Ramblers, an Italian lefty band...for some reason they are wearing kilts to perform this, perhaps because they think of themselves as playing Irish traditional music.

And then I remembered that the song used to be played a lot at Jewish weddings and barmitzvahs, at which the young men would try to dance a pseudo-Russian squatting dance that they would call the "kazotzkas", which would result in everyone getting very sore thighs. In fact I had once thought of it as a Jewish tune, and I recalled that there was a Hebrew version. I'm pretty sure we sang it once or twice in my Zionist youth movement, and it turns out that it was translated into Hebrew as early as 1945, probably as part of the Socialist-Zionist love affair with all things Soviet.

And finding the Hebrew version on YouTube, I also came across this, which has to be a strong contender for the weirdest thing on the internet - a Yiddish version, syncopated, performed by some sort of folk choir from Birobidzhan, in a made-up Jewish folk costume. Are these people actually even Jews? What tradition does this costume, and this song and dance, form part of?

Of course it turns out that the tune is not a traditional one but was written by Matvey Isaakovich Blanter,  a Soviet (Jewish) composer in 1938. 

Review of Mr Jones

A well-told tale about the Welsh reporter who broke the story about the 1930s famine in the Ukraine, when the rest of the Moscow-based western press corps didn't...because they were too lazy and supine, it's implied. There's a bit of a hint that they judged the Communists to be the lesser evil vs. the Nazis, and some of them probably did. One of the main characters is Walter Duranty, the New York Times bureau chief, who was actually even weirder than the he is portrayed in the film...he hung out with Aleister Crowley for a start. 

I understand the family of Gareth Jones were unhappy about some of the details, and it's perhaps not unreasonable to think about the wider context of the famine...the Soviet drive to industrialise, the scissors crisis during the early Soviet period ...and so on. Don't know whether he really met Eric Blair either...certainly Animal Farm wasn't written until after 1943 and Blair's experiences in the Spanish Civil War, which turned him into an anti-Stalinist, though the film implies that he was writing it during the 1930s as he met Gareth Jones.

But a decent film nonetheless, cinematically interesting and with decent acting and dialogue. Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Living

Is it possible for a film to be boring and enjoyable at the same time? Well, this one does a pretty good job. Bill Nighy is a bureaucrat at the London County Council in the 1950s, and he's emotionally sclerotic (with his co-workers and his son) and acts as a road block to stop anything happening - a group of women from an estate in the East End want to turn a bomb site into a children's playground, and they are routed back and forth between departments to ensure that nothing ever happens to their proposal.

Then he learns that he's going to die from cancer, and he goes very slightly off the rails, visiting an improbably bohemian Brighton, taking a young woman who is a former colleague to lunch at Fortnum's, not turning up to work, and so on. 

It's all beautifully done, though not much really happens. It's all about the feelings, and the facial expressions that are about not revealing them.

I note in passing that there's something of a geographical error in the film. The bureaucrat and his colleagues arrive by suburban commuter train into Waterloo Station, and then cross a bridge over the Thames to approach County Hall, then the HQ of the London County Council. Except that County Hall is on the same side of the river as Waterloo, so how can they be crossing the river to approach it?

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, having obtained it via informal download.

There's a very good review in the London Review of Books here.

Review of "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong

A short book, but one with a lot to it...coming of age as gay in rural Connecticut, the Vietnam war and its impact on Vietnamese and Americans, the devastation wrought by opioids on working class communities, deindustrialisation and poverty...and what it's like to be a writer in the shadow of all that. And death, and abandonment, and separation. Just brilliant really, and I may read it again.

Review of Where the Crawdads Sing

A feel-good film about nature, child abuse, male violence, rape, murder...what's not to like? Actually a really good film, with a moderately complex narrative structure, some nice acting, lovely nature footage, a courtroom drama aspect, and a great ending. Hard to say much else without spoiling, but well worth watching.

Watched in the middle floor at Springhill, obtained via informal distribution.

Review of "The Debt to Pleasure" by John Lanchester

Hard to do justice to this while avoiding spoilers. It's a great, clever, well-written and thoroughly nasty book. It's written in the first person by a snobbish food bore, who writes pretentiously about a journey to his summer home in France through a series of menus and recipes. Despite the fact that he's deeply unpleasant it's not too terrible to spend all this time in his company, because some of his knowledge about food and history is actually enjoyable. 

It's so pretentious that there are laugh-out-loud moments, along with insights into the narrator's history and personality of which he seems to be unaware. We gradually learn that he's an unreliable narrator, though this is done so slowly that it wasn't apparent to me. 

And that's pretty much all I can say without ruining it for you. 

Review of Flee

Really good animated feature film about a young gay man who is fleeing from Afghanistan. Every so often it's inter-cut with some archive film, including scenes of pre-war Kabul, and it's sort of shocking how modern the dress and the shops look. Lots of happy, smiling young women in modern dress on the streets and on public transport. There are also some scenes from what must be Communist Party congresses, with lots of uniformed mustachioed men single The Internationale. And without wanting to romanticise the period of Communist rule, it's hard not to wonder where all those men went, and whether any of them are still there as the potential constituency for a very different kind of Afghanistan.

But it's mainly about the experience of being a displaced refugee, and it's grim and very effective. 

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "Elmet" by Fiona Mozley

Oh blimey, what a book! A depiction of rural, underclass, off-the-grid life. The people here are one fraction of that subculture...the kind that intermingles with Travellers, takes part in illegal bare knuckle prizefights, poaches and hunts...not the solar-powered vegan off-grid van-dwelling underclass, even though vans also feature here. Heroin addiction is in the background, though not specifically mentioned.

It's rough and violent, and often shocking. The book is also well written, structured and has some very evocative nature writing. It sometimes uses language that I don't think the first-person narrator would actually use, but that doesn't matter too much.

This is a debut novel, and it's pretty brilliant, though not an easy read.