Review of "From The Holy Mountain: a journey in the shadow of Byzantium" by William Dalrymple

I've listened to William Dalrymple on the "Empire" podcast, and I think of him as a decent, progressive, liberal and intelligent sort of guy. This book came as a bit of shock. The framework is him following in the footsteps of a learned Byzantine monk who decided to go with a mate to visit the monasteries of the Byzantine empire, so he goes to the same monasteries, now much depleted or deserted and left as tiny islands of Christianity in a world that is mostly Muslim (and in one small corner, Jewish). He meets a lot of monks who he experiences as very good, ascetic and holy, and he repeats apparently unquestioningly the bollocks that they believe about demons, possession, miracles and relics. 

He's learned in a way that upper class Brits who have had a "classical" education can be, and he can draw on lots of background about the history of the Empire and of religion to make it interesting. As we went through I occasionally noted places where he'd left things out that didn't favour his narrative of beleaguered Eastern Christians keeping alive a flame of holiness. 

The book is from 1998, and what's changed and what hasn't in terms of the contemporary politics that he describes is interesting. The Kurdish PKK has laid down its arms and ended its guerrilla war against Turkey, and the Islamists that are only just beginning to appear on the horizon in 1998 are now firmly in power. The lovely orderly oasis of religious toleration that he finds in Syria is its exact opposite, and probably wasn't nearly as nice as he seemed to think it was even back then. Lebanon is an even bigger shit heap than it was then.  I was reminded by the book about the trail of massacre and counter-massacre...I suspect that almost all of my friends know about the Deir Yassin massacre, but I bet not one of them has heard about the Damour massacre, when Fatah and Palestinian Ba'athist fighters slaughtered hundreds of Lebanese Christians in retaliation for an earlier massacre, and for which the subsequent slaughter of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila massacre was claimed as a retaliation by some of the victims' relatives. 

The Israeli pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank, and persecutions in Israel proper, have notched up a gear - he doesn't mention or go to Gaza, which is funny because there's quite a lot Byzantine Christian stuff there, including a very old and famous monastery. 

And his analysis of the Mubarak regime and its "crackdown" on the Muslim Brotherhood is so misguided as to be comical. I guess "experts", and people who visit and talk to others on the ground, are not really better informed than anyone else. Did the Western intelligence agencies see the fall of Mubarak coming? I don't think so.

Review of Margarete: Queen of The North

A well-plotted, well acted and beautifully shot Danish history movie, about the woman who managed to unify the warring kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden and Norway in the fourteenth century. The apparently massive budget definitely shows - stunning landscape shots, beautiful interiors and clothes. 

The drama comes from the sudden appearance of a man claiming to be the Queen's supposedly dead son Oluf, which undermines her plans to marry her adopted son and co-ruler Erik to an English princess and thereby solidify the dynasty and the union. The real history says that the impostor's claims were not at all believable, and the plot was amateurish. In the film it's left uncertain as to whether "Oluf" is genuine is not - I incline to think that the film is saying that he was, and that the Queen believed him.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of "Swing Time" by Zadie Smith

Not really my sort of book - coming of age novel about a young mixed race women living in Willesden with a politically engaged mother and a loving but ineffectual dad, and her better-dancer friend who has a brief West End chorus line career, and the protagonist's career as a gopher for an Australian pop-singer celeb (who seems to me to be thinly disguised Kylie). 

But I enjoyed it lots anyway...Zadie Smith (who I don't think I've actually read before) is a very good writer and lots of it is beautifully observed, particularly the bits about NGOs and aid projects in Africa - the celeb wants to save the world one village at a time, and is really obnoxious about it.

Review of "Looking Backward" by Edward Bellamy

I decided to read this because I'd read William Morris's News from Nowhere, which is a response to this different vision of a socialist utopia. It's a strange and not particularly socialist book, though perhaps also an illustration of how many different things have been called "socialist" over the years. Bellamy's socialist future is one in which everything is run on corporate/military lines. Socialist has grown "naturally" out of the tendency of capitalism to monopoly - eventually all the big monopolists corporations merge into one, and then there's no capitalist competition so that's socialism, right? And work and production are organised via an "industrial army", with ranks and units and so on.

I have a vague memory that some of the German Social Democrats, in particular Hilferding, thought along similar lines - that Monopoly Capitalism would make socialism thinkable and possible.

Bits of are repulsive, though I think Bellamy has tried to think kindly about the way in which a future society will include women (somewhat better than Morris did), and about how "from each according to their ability" really does mean that those who can't contribute much deserve just as much as everyone else.

As a piece of fiction it's not great, but better than Morris's book, which has a lot of people floating about dressed as happy medieval peasants and doing cute crafty things. Bellamy's frame tale, in which he explains how his protagonist arrives in the future, also seems better crafted than Morris's, which is barely explained at all.

Review of "A Tree of Night and Other Stories" by Truman Capote

A collection so hard to review...just to say that each of the stories in this collection is a jewel, creepy but beautiful at the same time. Is Truman Capote under-appreciated? I think so.

Review of "News from Nowhere" by William Morris.

I've written elsewhere about how I feel like I ought to like William Morris, but somehow I end up not liking him. This book very much bears that out. It's supposed to be about a future socialist England (socialist guy goes to sleep in the late C19th and wakes up in the future), but it feels to me a reactionary sort of socialism...lots of medieval cosplay, a rejection of science and learning in favour of (literally) arts and crafts, no automation or even much mechanisation. There's a kind of equality between men and women, based on women's work being equally recognised as valuable rather than an end to the distinction between men's and women's work. I can't help thinking that reactionary medievalists like Chesterton and Ruskin would find little to dislike.

The book was a response to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, which set out a much more modernist mechanised automated future, and I'm looking forward myself to reading that and seeing if it's closer to fully automated luxury communism...I guess I will have to read that too!

Review of "The Land In Winter" by Andrew Miller

Poignant book about the life of two couples living in the countryside near Bristol, with both the wives pregnant. One of the men is a farmer who appears to have a Rachman-like figure as his father, the other a country doctor having an affair. It sounds a bit dull, but it's so brilliantly written, and the descriptions of the bleakness of both rural and urban life in what I think is the early 1950s is very vivid. 

I've liked everything Andrew Miller has written so far - I think it's all been historical novels so far, so this was a bit different, but still very good.

Review of All of Us Strangers

A beautiful, clever, touching film about love, death, loss, loneliness. Based on a book (the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada), which is often a good sign. There was an earlier Japanese adaptation ( The Discarnates) which I would also like to see now.

The plot is about a lonely gay man living in a near-empty newly-built tower block in London, who is visiting his dead parents in his childhood home in a small town to the South of London. It's beautiful done, without much explanation of the mechanism but with plenty of mystery, and it's not entirely clear how it works for the dead parents either.

Watched on Channel 4 catch-up.

Review of "Lacunae and Laocoon: For The Triumph of Democracy over Oligarchy" by Molly Scott Cato

I'm not really sure what the point of this book is. Molly Scott Cato said that she was writing a book about fascism, but it isn't that - fascism gets a bit of a walk on part, but there isn't even much about the relationship between it and the super-rich. It's a bit about some of the mechanisms used by corporations to subvert national governments and so on, though it doesn't seem to have much new in it. If you've been reading say New Internationalist, or even The Guardian, most of this will be familiar. Is it useful because it's a compendium and a guide to the existing literature? Not really...it's not comprehensive or well referenced enough. Does it offer a new way of thinking about it? Not that I noticed.

And it's sort of odd that it's so much about the way that the "rules based international order" is rigged, even as that order seems to be coming to an end and being replaced by something even worse.

There's not much reflection on what democracy means, or why it's a good thing...there's some stuff about the rule of law, also taken to be self evidently a good thing, without much reflection.

Review of The Idea of You

Silly but enjoyable romcom about a woman in her 40s who gets into a relationship with a boyband singer. No dramatic tension, every bit of conflict resolved almost as soon as it appears. Watched on BBC iPlayer or something.

Review of "Clown Town" by Mick Herron

I enjoyed this enough, but it was entirely formulaic. MH just winds up his characters and lets them go. Judd is pompous and conniving, Lamb is snarky and physically revolting, Caroline Standish struggles with her drink problem...

The plot is a thinly veiled version of Stakeknife, come back to haunt the new Labour Prime Minister, who had some hand in it back in the day.

A small mystery is why the right wing press like Herron so much, when his stories are so critical and subversive of their cherished institutions.

Review of Crush

2020 High School teen gay romcom. Light and fluffy - somehow the fact that all the teen romances are lesbian makes the film sweeter and more innocent. Lots of talk about sex, but very little actual sex apart from some teen girl kissing, though the central character's mum does some great dirty talking.

Watched on Channel 4 online.

Review of They Came to a City

A very dated black and white fantasy film from 1944, adapted from a 1943 stage play, in which nine characters from then-contemporary England find themselves in modernist utopia. The nine are supposed to represent a cross-section of English class society - there's a shady businessman, a caricature aristocrat, a charwoman, a seaman, a waitress...and so on.

It's very stage-y - we won't actually see the utopia, just the faces of the characters talking about it from a weird castle overlooking the wonderful city. They go into it, and then return to the castle to talk about it. The upper class characters mainly hate it, and the working class ones mainly love it. From their descriptions it seems a very limited sort of utopia - clean houses and streets, gardens, and everyone happy in their jobs. 

The frame tale is a man and a woman, both in uniform, talking about what England is going to be like after the war, and a stranger (played by J B Priestley, who wrote the play and the film screenplay) comes to describe the story to them.

I couldn't help noticing the accents - which along with the clothes, were the class markers for the characters. The posh accents felt authentic; after all, there's plenty of actual footage of posh people talking from that period, and they more or less all sound like Queen Elizabeth. The working class accents felt wrong - a lot of substitution of "eh" sounds for "ah" sounds - did working class people actually speak like that in the 1940s, or is that just how posh-speaking actors thought they spoke?

Watched on YouTube via Chromecast.

Review of "Hag-Seed" by Margaret Attwood

I think that this might be a picaresque novel...it's about a pompous, self-satisfied and lazy theatre director that gets his deserved comeuppance early in the book, and then - after a miserable decline that's hard to feel too sorry for - plots and achieves revenge over his equally awful enemies. It was not very enjoyable spending so much time in the company of not-so-pleasant people, but I gradually warmed to the book because despite everything Attwood is a such a good storyteller. Much of the narrative takes place in a prison, because the central character becomes the director of a prison theatre program, which he uses for the revenge.

Review of "The Historical David: The Real Life of An Invented Hero" by Joel Baden

Easy to read, slightly repetitive book that aims to decode the Biblical narrative through the methods of text analysis...although the author knows about the archaeological evidence he doesn't go there much. Still, it's from a solid historical perspective, and doesn't do the daft "but what was David really like" stuff that some analysis of Biblical stories that some authors do.

Review of The Teachers' Lounge

Well crafted drama about an episode in a modern German secondary school, in which a young teacher gets caught up when someone (A colleague? A student?) is suspected of stealing from others. The film deals well with racism in the school and among the staff, and with the way that management processes can spiral into a nightmare with minimal bad intention.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Corsage

Strange, slow film about the life of Elizabeth Empress of Austria-Hungary. The depiction of her life in the film appears really improbable, but a reading of her actual bio from Wikipedia is even weirder. The film doesn't seem to be very concerned to stick to the historical narrative, which seems odd in a biopic. For example [spoiler alert], it shows Elizabeth committing suicide by jumping into the sea, but the real Elizabeth died as a result of an unlikely assassination.  

It's just about possible that the film is an alternative account of the known facts (rather than a parallel account) because we are shown Elizabeth increasingly changing places with one of her ladies-in-waiting...so maybe she does commit suicide, and it's the lady-in-waiting who dies in the assassination many years later. Of course the Emperor Franz Josef would have had to been in on this, because although they don't spend that much time together they do occasionally have perfunctory sex, and he would surely have noticed.

Despite the slowness I enjoyed it, particularly the depictions of stultifying court life. Elizabeth doesn't seem to have much fun. I note in passing that although the rooms in the Imperial palaces are very grand, the corridors between them are shabby and cluttered with old furniture. Maybe that's how they were.

Review of "We, The Drowned" by Carsten Jensen

Big saga-type book about the seagoing inhabitants of the Danish town/island of Marstal over the period 1848 to 1945 - largely defined by a succession of wars against first Prussia and then Germany. It's also defined by the age of sailing merchant ships and their replacement by steamships; there are lots of vivid descriptions of how hard and injurious the life of the sailors were.

It took me a while to get into it, and I was a bit confused by shifting narrators, but I ended up enjoying it very much.

Review of "A History of The World in 47 Borders" by Jonn Elledge

Read this on holiday, and it was um sort of OK...some interesting geographical peculiarities, some of which I hadn't heard of. I think some of my favourites weren't in then - the enclave of Llivia, for example, a little bit of Spain inside the borders of France. Some others that felt like they could have been left out. A generally politically progressive sort of outlook, but a slightly "chap-ish" sense of humour that didn't land so well with me.

Review of Rental Family

A surprisingly enjoyable Japanese-American comedy about a big goofy American actor who finds himself working with an agency that supply actors into personal and domestic situations. Of course he becomes emotionally engaged with the people to whom his efforts are directed (not the "clients" as such because they are the ones who have hired him to deceive someone else) - an old and dementing man who was once a notable actor, and a young girl who needs a second parent to get into a private school.

Watched in the cinema on the Brittany Ferry ship to Santander!