Oxonianthe Review michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 of books Voices of the Victims Narrating the Genocide in Rwanda

n May 2003, I rode a bus from Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, to Gashora, a village two Ihours south, with 70 men who had committed genocide or crimes against humanity nine years earlier, when between 500,000 and 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were systematically killed in rapid and barbaric waves of ethnic violence. The men on the bus – some as young as 19, meaning they had committed genocide crimes when they were 10 – had, along with 20,000 other detainees across Rwanda, confessed to participating in the killing spree. In return for their confessions, the prisoners were being released provi- Gil Courtemanche. sionally from the country’s sordid, overcrowded jails and transported back to their home A Sunday at the Pool in communities. Waving, cheering locals – mostly Hutus – lined the streets to welcome the Kigali. Translated by Patricia returning genocidaires as if they were a liberation army. Claxton. Edinburgh: Onboard the detainees danced and sang as they watched the prison camp recede in Canongate Books, 2003. the rear window and the red dirt roads wind homeward before them. Soon their ecstasy 258 pages. turned to frustration at the slowness of the bus as it bounced along the rutted, dusty Peter Harrell. tracks out of Kigali, then to fatigue and finally to uncertainty and fear at the realities of Rwanda’s Gamble: Gacaca their situation. They had confessed to some of the worst crimes imaginable and now they and a New Model of Transi- tional Justice. were returning to the same communities where they had committed those crimes. What New York: Writers Club reception awaited them? After nine years, would their overjoyed friends and families, or Press, 2003. 130 pages. the friends and families of their victims, be there when they got off the bus? Gil Courtemanche’s novel, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, and Peter Harrell’s academic text, Rwanda’s Gamble: Gacaca and a New Model of Transitional Justice, offer complemen- tary accounts of both the situation that saw the dancing genocidaires imprisoned in the first place and the situation into which they have been released. Courtemanche offers a fictional description of the genocide and the lives of those who experienced it firsthand, while Harrell examines what should be done to bring genocide suspects to justice. Both of these books are firsts. A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is the first fictional account of the Rwandan genocide published in English (and, to my knowledge, only the second fictional work ever based on this subject, after Jean-Pierre Campagne’s little-known 1997 novella Les Vacances de Dieu). Rwanda’s Gamble constitutes the first lengthy scholarly examination by a Western academic of “gacaca” (pronounced ga-CHA-cha and derived from the Kinyarwanda word meaning “on the grass”), a traditional Rwandan form of communal conflict resolution that has been controversially revitalised and reformed to handle cases related to the genocide. The suspects who were recently released from jail are slated to In this issue continued on page 8 Extraordinary Growing Pains Money and Language and Yellow Dog Women Pornography Grace

Felicity James on Gillian Dow on The Tom Chatfield on April Warman Stephen Burley on Carol Shields’ life Order of the Phoenix Martin Amis’ Money on Geoffrey Hill’s Martin Amis’ Latest and work Orchards of Syon Novel

page 4 page 6 page 13 page 16 page 2 page 2 oxonian review of books michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog

he prophets of doom have been relationship with K8, (who claims ‘the best Tenjoying themselves in recent months prix r small & soft’), are described with a composing Martin Amis’s literary obituar- comic and linguistic flair that characterises ies, and his latest novel, Yellow Dog, has Amis at his very best. The third strand been proclaimed the futile flailing of a involves London godfather-figure Joseph middle-aged writer desperately trying to Andrews, whose violent escapades with recapture the genius of his youth. Much Keith the Snake and run-ins with Xan’s fa- of this melodramatic reaction was incited ther Mick are retold in the format of Amis’ by Tibor Fischer’s ‘killer preview’ in The source, Mad Frankie Frazer’s trilogy of Telegraph of 4 August. Fischer’s deeply per- autobiographical reminiscences. Then there sonal invective against Amis and his agent are the episodes surrounding the reigning Andrew Wylie (who Fischer himself parted monarch Henry IX, whose stupidity, and Martin Amis. company with some years ago), is as offen- whose dependence on the servants Bug- Yellow Dog. London: Jonathan Cape, sive as it is ridiculous, and it is no coinci- ger and Love, is perhaps Amis’s attempt to 2003. 340 pages. dence at all that Fischer’s new novel was provide a distorted glimpse of life under published on the very same day as Yellow the future Charles III. This critique of the Dog. Indeed, such literary scavengers have contemporary royal household continues been dogging Amis for quite some time when Henry’s daughter, Princess Victoria, now and one shudders to think what would becomes the centre of a scandal involv- happen if Amis did actually produce a ter- ing a video of her bathing naked with two rible novel. Although it is true that Yellow ‘pretty Arab boys’. And, finally, there are Dog doesn’t quite match the standard set by the fragments detailing the difficulties and Money or London Fields, it is still a dizzying eventual crash of flight 101 Heavy, carrying journey into a parallel universe written with the corpse of Royce Trainer. Amis’s characteristic dark humour. It would be wrong, however, to give There are five principal narrative strands the impression that Yellow Dog is merely a within Yellow Dog. First, there is the story comic foray into an eccentric world: it is of the main protagonist Xan Meo, the much more. Amis engages with contem- London writer/actor with roots in the porary culture like no other writer of his underworld of the East End. Meo, hav- generation, and there are dark undercur- ing a quiet drink on the anniversary of rents below the surface of the novel. The his divorce from his first wife Pearl, gets obscenification of every day life resulting attacked by mobsters and suffers a seri- from tabloid journalism and email cul- Then there are ous head injury. This event has a lasting ture, the primordial violence of man, the the episodes psychological effect and transforms him tortured relationships between men and surrounding the from the perfect husband and Renaissance women, the inability of parents to protect reigning monarch Man to a primordial state in which he their children from society and ‘the thing Henry IX, whose perpetually lusts for sex, rapes his wife, and which is called world’, incest, the monarchy behaves incestuously towards his young as an institution, the war on terrorism – all stupidity, and daughter Billie. Next is Clint Smoker, the are addressed by Amis with his entertaining whose depend- abominable hack at the Daily Lark, who spite and venom. ence on the serv- lives in a disgusting semi in Foulness and The novel begins with an allusion to ants Bugger and whose miniscule penis is a constant con- Dickens, and at times the reader suspects Love, is perhaps cern. Perfectly in tune with the ‘wankers’ that Amis is about to contrive a Dickensian Amis’s attempt to (i.e. ‘readers’) and ‘wankership’ of the Lark, ending that brings all of the characters provide a distort- Smoker’s journalistic talents are much together, but the novel instead expands and admired. His attempts to increase the bulk fragments in a post-modern imbroglio. At ed glimpse of life of his ejaculations to ‘porno proportions’, times the references to September 11, the under the future his disappointing sexual encounters with war on terror and the difficulties of flight Charles III female escorts, and his blossoming email continued on page 11 michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 oxonian review of books page 3

the Oxonian Review of books From the Editor The City and the University http://www.oxonianreview.org After working in corporate mergers & only in an economic but also in a sort acquisitions research in the City for two of personal, emotional sense (everyone Editor in Chief years, I came up to Oxford in September seems to know someone who was talking Leonard Epp 2001 to begin working on my DPhil in to someone in the World Trade Center at English literature. Life in the City is quite the time) – but in my experience the attack Executive Editor exciting, and it was especially exciting in the and its consequences find more robust Rachel Carrell midst of the millennial tech-boom market articulation in places like Oxford, where Business Staff optimism and its subsequent decline. When we have the potential (and the time) for Emily Travis you work in the City, you get to ride a cosy daily interaction with people who have tube to work every morning, rush to work widely different motives, forms of exper- Editors from the station, and work until 9pm or tise, and types of professional experience. Kristin Anderson so, six days a week if you’re lucky; then Oxford in Michaelmas 2001 was the kind Chris Bradley you get to rush to the pub, drink quickly, of place that showed exactly how exciting Josh Cherniss rush home and go to bed for a few hours and productive university life can be: liberal Phil Clark before you get to get up again. When you and conservative groups began to form David Williams get to chat with your busy colleagues, they and clash, partisan rallies were advertised Online Editor will fill you in on the post code they live as debates, and daily discussions raged, not Paul Vetch in, or the post code they might live in next about what ‘Consignia’ or ‘Accenture’ were year if they get that promotion; they will supposed to mean, but about the meaning Publisher let you know which restaurants they like, of ‘terrorist’ and the implications its stud- Paul Vetch and where they like to shop; when you ied ambiguity might have for personal and work in the City, you will even get to rush national freedom. Contributors to work and sit at your desk 72 hours a Life in Oxford, to say the least, is not week in expensive suits wearing expensive necessarily any more authentic than life The Oxonian Review would like to thank the shoes and watches and socks and ties. And in the City, and both are environments following for contribut- if you’re really lucky, every day you’ll get to that come under constant attack for being ing towards the cost of this issue: read the latest expensive report repeating detached from real life. And so they are. the same rhetorical nonsense in the same But part of what makes life as an Oxford Balliol College meaningless fad-language, written by some graduate student unrealistic is the time and Economics Department nameless consultant rising up the ranks of the opportunity you have to think about, an established consulting firm that, hired learn from, and interact daily with a broad The Oxonian Review of only for its name (in order to inspire inves- range of young, dynamic and committed Books is published pri- marily by graduate mem- tor confidence), only needs to maintain the students, public intellectuals, politicians, bers of the University of trappings of success in order to succeed. influential speakers and international activ- Oxford, although it wel- comes contributions from In other words, when you’re working in the ists with invaluably diverse backgrounds, other University mem- bers. Contributors bear City, you’ll have your fingers on the pulse futures, interests, and political commit- sole responsibility for its of the economies that drive the world’s ments. Believe me, some day soon you may content, which in no way reflects the views of the politics, but you may find yourself living in find yourself surrounded by the trappings University of Oxford. All a world where only the trappings matter. of a world even less realistic. works are copyright of their respective authors. That is the reason I chose in late 2000 Leonard Epp to go back to university, something I had Editor in Chief sworn I would never do. Life as a gradu- ate student in Oxford, of course, involves as many nonsense trappings of its own kind as life in the City does, but the op- portunities for informal debate, political engagement, and intellectual exchange are Got a letter for the editor? [email protected] breathtaking. The shock of September 11 in the financial world of the West should Want to advertise? not to be underestimated – it was felt not [email protected] page 4 oxonian review of books michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 The Extraordinary Carol Shields

ate in Carol Shields’ novel Unless was voted into the top ten list of Britain’s L(2002), Reta Winters, her main charac- best-loved books written by women. Larry’s ter, gets into a misunderstanding with her Party (1997) won the Orange Prize. Her new editor. The serious-minded Arthur, work became known in Britain in 1990 trained ‘at Yale, originally’, persists in read- when Christopher Potter, a commissioning ing her novel as a parable of human yearn- editor from Fourth Estate, read Swann by ing, of the ‘central moral position of the chance, and immediately began publish- contemporary world’. Just a little tweaking, ing her novels in the UK (‘Thank God,’ he tells Reta, and ‘your manuscript could she once commented, ‘for Christopher’). become a monument’. But Reta was writing It was her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries a comic fiction, a light jokey novel involv- which firmly established her reputation. ing a trombonist and a fashion editor, in Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, it received Blanche Howard and her search for an escape from her struggle the Canadian Governor General’s Award Carol Shields. to understand her eldest daughter, Norah. and won her the Pulitzer Prize. ‘The Stone A Celibate Season. Regina: Coteau Books, For reasons which are constantly speculat- Diaries,’ commented The New York Times 1991. 191 pages. ed upon – teenage perversity? martyrdom? Book Review, ‘reminds us again why litera- Shields, Carol. – Norah has dropped out of university to ture matters’. Others. sit on a Toronto street corner, holding up Shields herself had strong views on how Ottawa: Borealis Press, a sign which reads, simply, ‘GOODNESS’. literature matters. In a speech in 1996 she 1972. 60 pages. Those reasons are eventually divulged, but recalled someone asking her what she did Small Ceremonies. by the end of the novel each character has when not reading and writing. She replied: Toronto: McGraw-Hill had to consider their own reading of the Ryerson, 1976. 179 pages. I walk around and think about narra- word, and the narratives by which they tive, about the telling of stories, what Susanna Moodie: Voice construct their own lives. and Vision. they mean, these stories – and why we This is the familiar subject of Carol Ottawa: Borealis Press, need them. 1977. 81 pages. Shields’ writing: how people tell their own stories, and how those stories are inter- John Barth tells us that the central ques- The Box Garden. Toronto: McGraw-Hill preted by others. It’s impossible not to tion of the modern novel is not ‘What hap- Ryerson, 1977. 213 pages. see Unless, her last novel, as a backward, pens?’ but ‘Who am I?’1 Shields echoes and playful look at her own passion for writing expands on this insight, pointing out that Happenstance. Toronto: McGraw-Hill and how her own life has been read. As narratives available in the public domain Ryerson, 1980. 216 pages. she was working on Unless, Shields knew also ask ‘Who are we?’ From her earliest The Stone Diaries. that she was in the final stages of cancer. novels, she has contemplated the ‘stories London: Fourth Estate, Since her diagnosis in 1998, she had also that sustain our culture’, the ways in which 1993. 361 pages. written a book of short stories, Dressing Up narratives of conversation, advice, or Larry’s Party. for the Carnival (2000), and a biography of dispute bind our lives together. ‘I depend New York: Viking, 1997. Jane Austen (2001). When she died in July on eavesdropping,’ she wrote, ‘to fill my 339 pages. this year, she was in the middle of writing narrative litter bag’. Dressing Up for the another book. She saw her preoccupation Her writing has that immediate, com- Carnival. with story-telling as a form of ‘narrative pelling feel of something overheard or Toronto: Random House hunger’, a constant search for symbols and suddenly glimpsed. The Stone Diaries uses Canada, 2000. 237 pages. messages in the smallest of things. random narrative scraps – shopping lists, Jane Austen. Although she began her literary career diary entries, recipes, newspaper hints – to New York: Viking, 2001. 185 pages. with a collection of poems, Others, in 1972, compile the story of Daisy Flett, house- Carol Shields was best known for the sen- wife and mother. Daisy’s unremarkable Unless. sual, glowing prose of her ten novels, seven life, from her birth on a kitchen floor to Toronto: Random House Canada, 2002. 321 pages. plays, and three books of short stories her death in a Florida retirement home, is which in recent years finally achieved wide- pieced together from minutely observed spread critical recognition. Unless, short- details, but it is up to the reader to deter- listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2002, mine the connections and to construct her michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 oxonian review of books page 5 biography. This kind of reciprocity, a mutual reading, had not mentioned. There weren’t any, he replied, un- is emphasized by the way in which exchanges of letters less you counted a couple from the nineteenth century. feature so strongly in Shields’ work. In Small Ceremo- A talk by Martin Amis yielded much the same idea: ‘I nies (1976) and The Box Garden (1977) we see the same didn’t bother asking any questions that time’, Shields family through the letters and anecdotes of two sisters, recalled. Judith and Charleen. Happenstance (1980), a marriage Running alongside this dismissal of Shields as a from a wife’s perspective, can be turned around and ‘women’s writer’, another reading brackets her as a read from the husband’s point of view. The episto- ‘Canadian’ author. It’s certainly tempting to compare lary novel A Celibate Season (1991), which deals with her to novelists such as Margaret Laurence, with her collaborations and compromises in a marriage, is a col- careful evocations of Manitoba domesticity, or Mar- laborative writing effort itself, with Blanche Howard. garet Atwood, whom Shields playfully mentions in Shields is excellent at capturing the ‘small ceremo- Unless. There are obvious parallels between her grace- nies’, the special languages, of friendship and marriage. ful explorations of family relationships and those of In Larry’s Party, Larry, feeling his way through the laby- Alice Munro, with her luminous short stories. But to rinths of relationships, learns that ‘a happy marriage, place her firmly in this tradition is to circumscribe her whether it’s long or short, gathers a kind of density writing. In her study Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision around it’. Shields evokes that density very well. Like (1977), Shields argues that Moodie has suffered from John Updike, who has a similar mastery of the every- critics who want to force her into being a ‘shorthand day, she has a knack for noting down the dialect, ‘the symbol’ for Canadian national character. She is keen musical pattern’, of marriage. But most of Shields’ to point out that Moodie’s work forms part of a larger marriages, unlike those Updike describes, are happy, literary dialogue, a dialogue in which Shields’ own writ- or on their way to happiness. This reflects the impor- ing constantly participates. tance of the family bond to Shields (in interviews, Her sense of a far-reaching community of read- her husband Don, whom Shields married in 1957, is ers and writers emerges strongly in her biography of a constant background figure). ‘I don’t think I would Austen, where she shows how Austen’s reading shaped have become a writer if I hadn’t been a mother’, she her treatment of ‘reflective men and women’. Her once commented – a world away from Cyril Connolly’s own novels show traces of her love for eighteenth- condemnation of the ‘pram in the hall’ as the writer’s and nineteenth-century writing, for George Eliot and enemy. She often returned to the point that contempo- Henry James. Unless takes its epigraph from Middle- rary writing seeks to ‘record what separates us rather march, and it is in part shaped both by Eliot’s atten- than what brings us together’. Why don’t novels, she tion to the microscopic and by her vivid symbolism. asked, instead admit that ‘a long relationship…can be ‘Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your as complex, as potentially dynamic, and as open to continued on page 12 catharsis as the most shattering divorce’? Perhaps those long marriages, those close friend- ships, account for her dismissal by a reviewer who Sonnet commented that she did not do ‘sadness well’. Unless, a novel of ‘great unhappiness and loss’, seems to be a Nature perplexed me with the rhymer’s curse typically shrewd answer to such criticism. Reta is well When the stars yawned upon my doubtful birth – aware that she may be seen as a writer of ‘whimsy’, An itch to love, and scratch myself in verse confined to a limited literary sphere. She is fearful Was all the joy they promised me on earth; ‘of being in incestuous waters, a woman writer who Spenser wove a faery web; Sidney bowed is writing about a woman writer who is writing’. Set To fate and made his heart a stage to paint against this is her anger at the ‘callous lack of curiosity The verities of fashion; Milton ploughed about great women’s minds’, ‘those who are routinely Cathartic versions of a ruptured saint; overlooked, that is to say half the world’s population’. Mr Wordsworth made a case for passion. Reta’s anger works as a forceful vindication of Shields’ Is there room left in the bed? Couldst thou blow beliefs. In her novels, her plays, and her biographies, This trumpet into strains of animation? Shields set out to redress what she saw as a neglect of When I speak will my words about your fancy go? ‘ordinary life’ in fiction, which she linked to the ‘casual A clown must be forever more a clown dismissal of women’ by the literary establishment. She Unless he get himself a purple gown. vividly remembered listening to a lecture by George Steiner, and asking him about the women writers he Damian Love page 6 oxonian review of books michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix

here were you on the 21st of June their headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, and W2003? Queuing up outside your sent home for the school holidays with local bookstore as the clock struck mid- the words ‘remember Cedric Diggory’ night? Gritting your teeth and scorning the ringing in their ears. It is little wonder, stupidity of the masses? Or somewhere in then, that the opening of The Order of the between, bemused by the hype, but also Phoenix shows Harry becoming more and looking forward to the next instalment in more agitated as summer drifts by without JK Rowling’s tale of a boy wizard? Many news of You-Know-Who. When Harry commentators have lamented the hard-sell eventually gets to meet the Order of the marketing that accompanied the launch Phoenix – the group that Dumbledore has of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, hastily reassembled to fight the Dark Lord Rowling, J.K. the fifth in the series of J.K. Rowling’s – he learns that the Ministry of Magic has Harry Potter and the Order Potter books. Well before the publication been discrediting the story of Voldemort’s of the Phoenix. London: Bloomsbury, date, there was much speculation about the return and has demoted Dumbledore from 2003. 766 pages. plot (someone, it was whispered – indeed, all positions of power outside Hogwarts. a main character – would die!). Rowling Despite Dumbledore’s seeming optimism chose to be interviewed by a heavyweight – ‘Dumbledore says he doesn’t care what political commentator, Jeremy Paxman.1 they do as long as they don’t take him During the resulting television programme, off the Chocolate Frog Cards’ – things we were shown copies of the book and are looking bleak. The members of the given elusive hints that we might ‘learn Order point out that it is hard for them to more about Snape’ and Harry’s past. convince the public that there is danger Impatient with media reverence, David when those who govern them insist there Aaranovitch, writing in the Guardian,2 told is none. As Sirius Black, Harry’s godfather, us it was impossible to ‘live in the Western puts it, if ‘everyone thinks I’m a mass-mur- world and be unaware that there is a new derer and the Ministry’s put a ten thousand Rowling book’. And several critics resorted Galleon price on my head, I can hardly to mud slinging and preaching from the stroll up the street and start handing out pulpit of ‘high-culture’. A.S. Byatt’s article leaflets, can I?’ in the New York Times damned the adult In The Order of the Phoenix we are in a readers of the Potter books, which she said larger and more frightening world than are ‘written for people whose imaginative in the previous Potter books. It is a more I ordered my copy lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the grown-up world where, for example, the of The Order of exaggerated... mirror-worlds of soaps, real- government controls the media. The Daily 3 the Phoenix in ity TV and celebrity gossip’. Prophet are running a nasty anti-Potter cam- advance from This reviewer is one of that despised paign, as eager to do down celebrities as group. I ordered my copy of The Order our own press, and the impending danger Amazon, was of the Phoenix in advance from Amazon, is worse for being unknown. Voldemort is annoyed when it was annoyed when it was not delivered back, but he doesn’t seem to be acting. In was not delivered on the publication date, wrote a disgrun- the meantime, the new Defence Against on the publica- tled email to the distributors, and settled the Dark Arts teacher, Dolores Umbridge, tion date, wrote a down happily with all 766 pages when it is creating plenty of terror on her own. disgruntled email finally arrived. The previous book, Harry Marina Warner, in her article ‘Did Harry 4 to the distributors, Potter and the Goblet of Fire, had ended with have to grow up?’, points out that Um- a cliffhanger. The dreaded Lord Volde- bridge’s idea of detention is something and settled down mort had returned, killing one of Harry’s that ‘recalls the tortures of Kafka’s In the happily with all classmates, and regrouping his faithful Penal Colony’. Harry is fifteen in this book, 766 pages when it Death-Eaters around him. The whole of the Bildsdungroman of the sequence. He has finally arrived. Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wiz- his first kiss, a couple of disastrous dates, ardry was informed of the resurrection by discovers that his adored father ‘had been michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 oxonian review of books page 7 every bit as arrogant as Snape had he’s barking, the potty wee lad/but The Second War may be about told him’, and ends the book feel- some are more kindly and think to begin, but there are still Divi- ing isolated from his friends, and he’s just sad’) and there is even a nation homeworks to be fabri- more alone than ever before. brief return of Gilbert Lockhart, cated and Quidditch matches to One of the important lessons the vain former Defence of the be won. Hagrid will always have Harry must learn is that ‘the world Dark Arts teacher, not seen since a new monster to conceal, Mrs isn’t split into good people and Book Two. There are also enough Weasley will always be delighted death-eaters’. There are truly vile minor new characters to keep about a new prefect in the fam- characters such as Umbridge, who readers entertained; Nymphadora ily, and Harry and Ron will never is not in league with Voldemort, Tonks, the Auror who likes to read Hogwarts: a History. It is these and there are good people who change the shape of her nose dur- recurring themes that remind the make bad decisions: Percy Weasley, ing dinner and Luna Lovegood, reader throughout The Order of for example, has argued with his eccentric and a victim of severe the Phoenix that Rowling always family and decided to attempt to bullying, are two of the most ap- intended the Harry books to be a further his career by siding with the pealing. seven-part series, that the project Ministry against them. The wizard- Where Rowling excels, however, was thought through long before ing world’s sense of superiority is in relating the Hogwarts experi- the marketing started, before over the rest of the magical com- ence to the world her readers know. the films and the accompanying munity is perilous – house elves, We may never have sat OWLs merchandise. Minor details from centaurs and goblins are all shown (Ordinary Wizarding Levels – the earlier books are brought up and to be rightly disgruntled, and the wizarding examinations taken at the explained. When Harry is shown symbol of the fountain of magical end of the fifth year at school), but to the Room of Requirements by brethren is quite literally shattered we’ve all had the kind of careers Dobby the House Elf, and told that at the end of the book. Even pok- interviews that involve looking at this room always equips itself for ing fun at Muggles – ‘muggle-bait- endless leaflets with titles like ‘So the user’s needs, he is reminded of ing’- is shown to be an expression You Think You’d Like to Work in a much earlier episode: ‘if you re- of something more sinister. Muggle Relations?’ and ‘Have You ally needed a bathroom,’ said Harry, Marina Warner’s view is that Got What it Takes to Train Security suddenly remembering something ‘something about Harry growing Trolls?’ And we were all at school Dumbledore had said at the Yule up has taken away Rowling’s own with someone like Ernie Macmil- Ball the previous Christmas, ‘would sense of fun and, with it, Har- lan, who, we learn, ‘had developed it fill itself with chamber pots?’ It ry’s hopes and high spirits’. It is an irritating habit of interrogating is attention to detail, humour and certainly true that The Order of the people about their revision prac- a fast pace that makes Rowling a Phoenix is a darker creation than tices’: fine storyteller. Derivative, certainly, its predecessors. Harry himself revolutionary, perhaps not. Worth ‘How many hours d’you think spends the first half of the book you’re doing a day?’ he de- a read, yes. Lets hope the hype extremely angry (AND THE RE- manded of Harry and Ron as doesn’t put too many people off. O SULTING CAPITALISATION IS they queued outside Herbol- Gillian Dow is in the final year of a SOMEWHAT WEARING). But ogy, a manic gleam in his eyes. DPhil on the 18th Century French the inventiveness of the new places ‘I dunno,’ said Ron. ‘A few.’ in the magical world, the Ministry author, Mme de Genlis, author of ‘More or less than eight?’ works for children with edifying of Magic, and St Mungo’s Hospital ‘Less, I s’pose,’ said Ron, look- titles such as Eglantine, or Indolence for Magical Maladies and Injuries, ing slightly alarmed. Reformed. Those who think the is as delightful as the very first ‘I’m doing eight,’ said Ernie, ‘Harry Potter’ series is moralising description of Owl Post. And our puffing out his chest. ‘Eight should try Genlis. favourite characters are all there: or nine. I’m getting an hour Mr Weasley’s enthusiasm for all in before breakfast every day. Notes things Muggle-related is unabated Eight’s my average. I can do 1 ‘Newsnight’, 18 June, 2003. (‘“simply fabulous” he whispered, ten on a good weekend day. I 2 ‘We’ve been muggled’ , The Guardian - 22 indicating the automatic ticket did nine and a half on Monday. June, 2003. machine’ in the London Under- Not so good on Tuesday – only 3 ‘Harry Potter and the Childish Adult’, The ground), Peeves is ever ready with seven and a quarter. Then on New York Times - 7 July 2003. his doggerel insults (‘oh, most think Wednesday – ’ 4 ‘Did Harry have to grow up’ , The Observer, 29 June, 2003. page 8 oxonian review of books michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 continued from page 1 als for genocide’, occur around novel – death and sex – that form appear before gacaca in late 2003 Rwanda, Valcourt spends his days a barbed double-helix so tightly or early 2004, with the prospect beside the pool at the Hotel des entwined that it is often difficult that many will return to prison if Mille Collines in Kigali, from which to tell where sex ends and death their involvement in the genocide is the novel draws its title, observing begins. In the foreground is the deemed serious enough. the privileged classes – the bureau- increasing violence, as stories of n the preface to A Sunday at the crats who hassle the Government the killing and rape of Tutsis reach IPool in Kigali, which was origi- ministers, the expatriate workers Kigali from the surrounding hills nally published in French in 2000 and French paratroopers who flock and people disappear in the night and won the Canadian Prix des to the hotel to escape the heat and from their homes in the capital. In Libraires in 2001, Courtemanche violence - and the local prostitutes the background is the slow-motion says that the novel is intended as ‘a who service them all. Valcourt death of AIDS, the plague that chronicle and eye-witness report. sits alone and jots on his notepad, gnaws away at the nation’s mar- The characters all existed in reality, writing only ‘to put in time between row. As the relationship between and in almost every case I have mouthfuls of beer….waiting for Valcourt and Gentille develops - used their real names’. The author, a scrap of life to excite him and described in florid passages, strewn a French Canadian, worked as a make him unfold his wings’. with the verse of Paul Eluard, the journalist in Rwanda before and What makes Valcourt unfold only time in the novel that sex oc- during the genocide and this novel his wings, however gradually, is the curs with any gentleness or mean- draws on his personal observa- presence of Gentille, a beautiful ing – death and sex continue to tions from that period. This is a Hutu waitress at the hotel, who has blur in the outside world. Rape and strident, furious, at times shocking the fine, slender features of a Tutsi, AIDS are the killers, accelerating as novel, full of brutal imagery of ‘a mysterious mix of all the seeds everyone tries to “live and fuck and mass murder and sexual violence. and all the toil of this country’, the have a good time” in an attempt In telling the story of those who offspring of a Hutu ancestor who to forget the violence gathering at experienced the genocide directly, slept with a Tutsi because the latter their doorstep. Courtemanche also points the was politically favoured in colonial The Rwanda that Courtemanche finger at those responsible for the times. To survive in the modern paints is a country teetering on the killings: the Hutu elite who planned environment where Hutus have the edge of the abyss of AIDS and the genocide and incited the ascendancy, Gentille carries a black genocide. Death awaits everyone; population to do their bidding, the market Hutu identity card. Valcourt the only question is whether death Catholic Church in Rwanda that and Gentille fall in love, with Gen- will come as a result of the ‘cock or not only turned away from the car- tille begging Valcourt to ‘teach me the machete’. In the swirl of vio- nage unfolding before its eyes but about desire’ as she willingly learns lence, Valcourt and Gentille travel whose own hierarchy was in many to ‘die with ecstasy’ in their sexual south to Gentille’s village to ask her cases complicit in the violence, and ‘mutual suicide’. Gentille wants family’s blessing of their marriage. the United Nations and the expatri- to be treated as more than a body Gentille’s father welcomes Valcourt ate community as a whole that fled the country or – if it was mandated to stay - stood by and did nothing Death awaits everyone; the only question is whether death will come as innocent civilians were hacked to as a result of the ‘cock or the machete’ death. Courtemanche tells the story of the genocide through his alter-ego, abused by the patrons of the hotel. as a son but warns him that he is Bernard Valcourt, a Canadian jour- Valcourt wants a deeper connec- ‘marrying a country they want to nalist, who has come to Kigali to tion both to another human being kill’. Gentille begs Valcourt to take make a film and to set up a televi- and to a country he is beginning her to Canada and her father im- sion station designed to educate to call home, in short an end to plores Valcourt to ‘flee the madness Rwandans about AIDS. Valcourt the journalist’s transitory, parasitic that invents peoples and tribes’. But is a fictional archetype, a burnt-out existence. Valcourt refuses to leave and in one case who has been in the country This cross-cultural romance in of the book’s most memorable pas- too long and seen too much. As the midst of ethnic violence opens sages he and Gentille are married small massacres of Tutsis, ‘rehears- up the two recurring themes of the in a surreal ceremony around the michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 oxonian review of books page 9 same hotel swimming pool where manitarian community that is so civil servant who follows procedure they first met. Leaving the hotel often populated by more brutish to the letter,’ adding, ‘here, if you after the wedding, Valcourt and types lugging colonial baggage follow procedure, you’re a hundred Gentille are stopped at a roadblock – comes in for pointed criticism. corpses late.’ by Hutu militiamen. When the There is the quisling Jean Lamarre, Dallaire has become an infa- soldiers spy Gentille, the Hutu with the rookie Canadian consular of- mous, tragic figure in the historical the features of a Tutsi, Valcourt ficial who, even when he knows he record of the genocide in Rwanda. learns the tragic truth of what it should speak out about injustice, As head of UNAMIR, Dallaire means to marry a country that the keeps his head down in order to sent a telegram to UN headquarters extremists want to kill. crawl up the bureaucratic ranks. in New York three months before In contrast to the frantic energy Courtemanche’s Kigali is flooded the genocide started, arguing that of the Rwandans in the novel, with these naïve expatriate types. mass violence was imminent and Courtemanche gives us the weary, ‘The Canadians are nice,’ says one a major bolstering of the peace- disengaged whites who flood the of the prostitutes at the Mille Col- keeping ranks was necessary in ranks of aid and development lines. ‘They tend to tell us what’s order to protect the civilian popu- agencies across Rwanda. Africa good for us…. They try to disguise lation. UN heads refused Dal- is awash with the suit-and-tie, Ivy a fuck as a love story…and even laire’s request, much to his disgust. League-trained consultants that drunk, they’re reasonable.’ Dallaire petitioned constantly for Courtemanche describes: the World Courtemanche’s most startling more troops, even after the murder Bank experts and human rights portrayal of a Western official of ten Belgian peacekeepers in the monitors who arrive in conflict- working in Rwanda, though, is that first week of the genocide resulted ridden countries armed with their of the nameless Canadian general, in Belgium’s withdrawal of all its global templates and juvenile who we assume represents Ma- UNAMIR forces and in the United comprehension of local conditions. jor-General Romeo Dallaire, head States’ call for a complete abandon- This is the whitewashed army of of the United Nations Assistance ment of the mission. Soon after proceduralists that believes the Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) the genocide ended in July 1994, world behaves – or, more cru- in 1994. It is interesting that the Dallaire returned to Canada where cially, it should behave - according author refers to him only as ‘the the press reported that he was suf- to finely-understood rules that are Canadian general’ when in the pref- fering from severe post-traumatic finely-understood only by those ace he tells us that all the characters stress disorder and had on several who have walked the corridors of in the book existed in reality and, in occasions attempted suicide. Yale or Harvard. This is the army most cases, are referred to by their For the last nine years, Dallaire that values objective detachment real names. Perhaps the publisher’s has given few interviews but the above all else, that stays in hotels legal advisers recommended vague- majority of commentators on the like the Mille Collines, far from ness because Courtemanche de- genocide have lauded him for his the mess, from the same choked scribes the general as ‘unassuming, role in saving thousands of Rwan- streets and squalid markets that it apprehensive, ineloquent and naïve, dan civilians. While Courtemanche, squeezes into its ten-point plans for like Canada’, ‘an imitation Swiss, a in his guise as novelist, is free to development. The proceduralists continued on next page who linger in countries like Rwanda grow tired and cynical when their “I wasted time, templates fail to produce the desired results. Most, however, do not stay long enough to weary of and now doth time waste me.” Africa’s perceived intransigence – like televangelists, they flit on the Don’t make the same mistake as Richard. Advertise here today. screen, read their sermon and van- ish with their wallets and their CVs the bloated at the expense of wracked Oxonian Review and desperate individuals. of books In A Sunday at the Pool, Courte- manche’s home country of Canada For more details please check out the advertising guidelines on our website at - usually the darling of the hu- http://www.oxonianreview.org or email [email protected] page 10 oxonian review of books michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 create fictional characters such as the Canadian general coffee and banana palms that form the backdrop to in any fashion he chooses, the stakes are higher in the violence paint a vivid picture of the menace and this book because of its moral tenor and the author’s fear that pervaded Rwanda in 1994. Courtemanche contention that it be treated as an eyewitness account. also succeeds in painting an illuminating tableau of the Targeting the Dallaire figure obviously serves Courte- various strata of Rwandan society and their different manche’s aim of criticising the UN for its procedural- roles in the genocide. The opening chapter, in par- ism and inaction during the genocide, but to lay the ticular, with its array of wheelers and dealers, soldiers, blame at the feet of the Canadian general – who in whores and bedraggled onlookers produces a convinc- real life constantly disobeyed orders in his attempt to ing snapshot of the background players who are so protect civilians – seems unfair in the extreme. Dal- instrumental in the deadly drama unfolding beyond the laire himself has now written a book, entitled Shake hotel walls. Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, Despite these successes, A Sunday at the Pool is about his experiences during and after the genocide. nonetheless an ultimately unfulfilling novel. Its main In recent interviews, he has said that the main aim of shortcoming is that we could glean most of its insights the book, due to be published by Random House in from any of the key historical texts already written on November 2003, is to set the record straight about his the Rwandan genocide. We expect more from a work personal efforts in 1994 and about how much the UN of fiction and Courtemanche promises us more. We and the US Government knew about the impending want to hear the characters speak in their own voices, genocide in Rwanda and how little they did to stop it. to tell us what the historical texts cannot tell us, that ourtemanche covers wide and rocky terrain in is, what it was like to live through the terror of 1994. CA Sunday at the Pool and the great success of the A Sunday at the Pool succeeds at the broad level of novel is its ability to reproduce the sweeping horror of describing the genocide and of making a compelling the genocide. The descriptions of tens of thousands political case, but it breaks down at the level that mat- of corpses rotting in the streets, the ever-present birds ters most, that of individual characters. Courtemanche of prey, and the deceptive beauty of the green hills of falls into the trap of many a journalist-cum-novelist in that he reports rather than tells a story, dictates rather than leaves us free to discover for ourselves. Courte- manche’s characters make plenty of speeches sounding too much like those of the detached Western experts Courtemanche would have us distrust. At times the dialogue becomes farcical, for example when Gentille’s peasant father insists on giving Valcourt an impromptu lesson in Rwandan history before blessing the couple’s marriage: [After 1959], the Belgians, who were a bit lost in an Africa that was shaking free of the colonial mould, and probably a bit tired of this unprofitable country, discovered as if by magic the virtues of democracy and the law of majority rule. Overnight, the shiftless Hutu became an incarnation of mod- ern progress, and the shapeless mass of ignorant peasants a legitimate democratic majority. The characters in A Sunday at the Pool are rarely more than caricatures: Valcourt, the cynical, brooding journalist turning his hard nose up at the naïve devel- opment agency types; Gentille, the oppressed indigène, uninitiated in the ways of love and life and awaiting the redemption that Valcourt brings. All we know about Gentille – all we know about most of the women in the novel, in fact – is that her name ‘is as lovely as her breasts…[her] ass more disturbing in its impudent Trout Walk Grace Yu continued on next page michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 oxonian review of books page 11 adolescence than anything else about her’. We never understand what brings Valcourt and Gentille together, Roman Pictures why they fall in love, nor why Valcourt, who appears so jaded by the country, claims that Rwanda holds him Italy beneath the wings, bright babble in such thrall that he cannot drag himself away, even Of voices, passports please, what century when the violence escalates. For all these reasons, it is Have we landed in? Sono inglese, hard to be concerned with his quandary about flee- Sono studente, do they understand? ing Rwanda or with the perilous fate that eventually Taxi-drivers, spivs, ask them, passers-by, overtakes him and Gentille. The greater problem is Which way from here the eternal city? that, in failing to make us believe in the tragedy that overwhelms his characters, Courtemanche precludes us One line or another, count on it, will from more fully understanding the genocide. Set us down in the Pantheon of the Courtemanche should be praised for bringing a Minute – squeeze in by the bella donnas, subject as perplexing and politically charged as the Sweat and perfume tangled knots of arms on Rwandan genocide to a literary audience. Sadly A The heaving Metro, bright rivers of flesh, Sunday at the Pool hovers in a no man’s land between Transported and baptised they set us down – personal testimony and outright polemic, never Avanti, avanti my friends, time is completely convincing in either. More angry, shat- Short, we have many Romes to build today! tered voices are needed to tell us what it was like to live through, and beyond, the 100 hellish days in 1994 Bustle of bright voices, sun through closed lids, when the world abandoned a people on the brink of Ooze of traffic, we hear them distantly – annihilation. Perhaps this sort of testimony will come Babble of bright voices of the past behind from Western journalists such as Courtemanche who Our eyes Catullus Virgil Cicero were brave enough to stay and bear witness. But what The saints and patrons the household gods is really needed are the angry, shattered voices of O On our shoulders have we borne them – sono those who have been silenced for too long – those Inglese, non capisco signore! of the Rwandans themselves. These petrol-drunken tides lapping at the Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part series. The Piazza, sunlight, sudden face tossed up second part will focus on Peter Harrell’s study of Gacaca From the surge, Anadyomene, she and transnational justice. Wanders off pouting; – surely there is the Phil Clark is an Australian DPhil student in Politics at Madonna with the buggy, wheeling her Balliol College. He was born in Sudan and grew up in Fat bambino through the pines, Armani Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. His doctoral thesis examines Blue on gold, chastely fingering the bracelet post-genocide justice and reconciliation in Rwanda and On her tanned wrist – issues of reconciliation and forgiveness in post-conflict societies more broadly. Bright babble of signs and boards, celluloid Suavity of silk on the old avatars, Per mangiare, signore, ho tre bambini! No sense, no sense this cluttered pageant, no continued from page 2 Sense but presence, per favore, haughty 101 Heavy can seem confusing and underdeveloped, Facades, plush painted martyrs, these we shall but there is no doubt that this is a novel of consider- Remember, svelte-eyed shop-girls, scootering able merit. Amis presents the reader with a world that Braggadocios, these our crumbs of radiance, is authentic in all of its ludicrous obscenity, tortured Per favore, our tender fragments of emotions and violent tragedies, and it is this affectation Tradition, snap them, snap around the clock, of brutal honesty, this calculated refusal to ‘toady to We will have this to show, per favore, the reader’, that marks him as one of the better living This album, this loose bundle, this Roman writers. Despite what its detractors suggest, Yellow Dog Relic, this curio. is a success. O

Stephen Burley has recently completed an MPhil in Damian Love grew up in New Zealand and studied Romantic literature at St. Catherine’s College, and is now English literature at the universities of Otago and St studying for a PGCE at King’s College London. Andrews. He is currently working on Beckett at Oxford. page 12 oxonian review of books michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 continued from page 5 head’, thinks Reta in the opening paragraph On the side of forgetting of the novel. ‘It takes all your cunning just For my grandmother Anghelina to hang on to it, and once it’s smashed you have to move into a different sort of life’. I We stood in the main doorway Reta’s voice is companionable, immediate, according to the custom of important days lively – but behind Shields’ transparent (usually marked by the village priest) prose lie layers of allusion. In a moment with holy water dripping from dry basil of self-mockery Reta describes one of her but now recorded in the slow turn of hinges): own short stories as ‘rather Jamesian’, but Come back, you said, I will, I said. as we read further we realise this is a know- ing comment. Shields herself plays with You stored the coffers with my dowry Jamesian ideas of language and perception, and we walked to the station before dawn. with what she terms ‘the crippling limita- tions that language imposes’. That ‘pane The moon whitened the crossing of dirt roads of glass’ is also a deliberate echo of James’ spread like open palms. golden bowl, a fragile symbol of marital happiness which turns out to be ‘glass II When I learned the new language - and cracked under the gilt’. There’s also a and abandoned the old one, whisper of Eliot’s description of Lydgate I practiced pronouncing new words contemplating his growing marital unhap- and felt new in their newness piness: ‘it was as if a fracture in delicate but your knitted pullover always gives me away. crystal had begun’. Shields was well aware of the literary When leaves turned their backs in storms weight behind her prose. Her genius lies in I sat imagining that I was a child by the sea balancing the symbolic weight of her writ- whistling through a flute made of cornstalk. ing with a lightness of touch, a capacity for illuminating the ordinary from the inside. Once I saw you in the crisscross of afternoon sunlight, ‘I could easily have been a Daisy Flett,’ lighting a candle under stained glass— she once said, marvelling that she had a heart beating under the ribs of a city discovered her gift for story-telling. ‘One you will never see. of those women who erases herself, who somehow slips out of her generation’. A The church orchestra practiced for Evensong poem by Daisy Flett’s fictional granddaugh- and something in me, like the breath released ter, placed at the beginning of The Stone from the throat of the flute escaped: Diaries, celebrates how, despite its ordinari- I mattered to no one there. ness, ‘her life could be called a monument’. Carol Shields’ ‘monument’, appropriately, is III This morning I awoke to the sound that her novels will continue, with undi- of birds inside of the yellow of gorse bushes, minished power, to tell the stories of her the hands of hills are in the sea, extraordinary ‘ordinary’ characters. O Tory island is a boat without sails. You whisper to me from hawthorns and hazels, Felicity James is a final-year DPhil student the earth will remember you. at Christ Church, working on Charles Lamb and concepts of friendship in the 1790s. Your wooden cross appears to me through the rain washing the cemetery. I want to walk around your grave three times, light incense and a candle inside the rusted bottomless bucket Notes lodged in the earth next to your head. 1 Quoted in Carol Shields, ‘Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard’. In Carol Shields, Narrative Carmen Bugan’s collection of poems, Crossing the Carpathians, will Hunger and the Possibilities of Fiction. Ed. Edward Eden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). be published by Oxford Poets/Carcanet next October. She is a DPhil p. 29. student at Balliol writing on Seamus Heaney. michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 oxonian review of books page 13 Money & Pornography

rom 1984’s Money to 2003’s Yellow Dog, Amis, Martin. in the lower levels of Martin Amis’s Invasion of the Space F Invaders. novels pornography represents a ubiq- London: Hutchinson, uitous element of our collective psyche. 1982. 127 pages. Amis is a satirist, and he treats pornogra- Money. phy as ‘the most political form of fiction, London: Jonathan Cape, dealing with how we use and exploit each 1984. 368 pages. other, in the most urgent and ruthless London Fields. way’,1 as J.G. Ballard once described it. London: Jonathan Cape, Considered in the widest social and politi- 1989. 470 pages. cal context, pornography in Amis’ novels The Information. is an example of the ruthless exploitation London: Flamingo, 1995. 493 pages. that passes for business practice, and of the animal desires that commercial enter- Yellow Dog. prise seeks to expand. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003. 340 pages. Money is a novel of urban dystopia, and in it Amis presents pornography as the visible tip of a submerged machinery of exploitation and profit. Fielding Goodney, the manipulative capitalist at the heart of Money, offers some frank advice to John Self (the novel’s narrator) about the indus- tries of addiction: Always endeavour, Slick, to keep a fix Amis does not argue that pornography simply ‘exploits’ the on the addiction industries: you can’t men or women it depicts. The essential power of pornogra- lose. The addicts can’t win. Nowadays phy is its deliberate and total reductiveness. the responsible businessman keeps a finger on the pulse of dependence. space games, slot machines, video nasties, nude mags, drink, People just can’t hack going out any pubs, fighting, television, handjobs. more. They’re all addicted to staying at home . . . Swallow your chemicals, ‘Lone gratification’ is the key. John Self moves between cities swallow them fast, and get back in- in which the only real link between people is that of money, of side. Or take the junk back with you. profit and loss, and where the moral diagram drawn by money is Stay off the streets. Stay inside. With inhumanly simple: better means more, and more means better. pornography. Money is indispensable to pornography, as Self admits – ‘I don’t know how to define pornography – but money is in the picture Solitary, one-way, rooted in the most somewhere. There has to be money involved’ – precisely because basic and the least rational of urges, it is the ideal generator of unanchored fantasy, and perfectly pornography is related by Amis to various matches the limitless need of consumers to sellers’ limitless desire activities, including video game playing - ‘if for profit. Fielding Goodney, in turn, is the ultimate capitalist. you wanted to locate space-game play- Remorselessly resolved to target areas of need, fear and lust, he ing as a moral activity, one would have to transforms escapist fantasies and denials into a more ‘real’ arena align it with pornography and its solitary of involvement than the less-brilliant hues of the mundane world. pleasures’, is how he puts it in Invasion of the For Amis, fantasy is society’s common language, one in which Space Invaders (1982) – and it finds its fullest solitary activities all tend towards that purest form of exploitation, embodiment in the figure of Money’s (trans- pornography. parently named) John Self. ‘All my hobbies Amis does not argue that pornography simply ‘exploits’ the are pornographic in tendency’, Self admits, men or women it depicts. The essential power of pornography The element of lone gratification is is its deliberate and total reductiveness. As John Self notes after bluntly stressed. Fast food, sex shows, watching pornography in a cubicle, it is ‘[h]ard to tell, really, who page 14 oxonian review of books michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 was the biggest loser in this compli- cated transaction – her, him, them, …[Selina] made a noise I’d never heard her make before, a rhythmical me’. Money is changing hands, whimpering of abandonment or entreaty, a lost sound… ‘Hey,’ I said some are exploited, others may be accusingly (I was joking, I think), ‘you’re not faking it!’ She looked star- gratified, but everything is drained tled, indignant. ‘Yes I am,’ she said quickly. Pis amcon hendigna feu of meaning or value beyond the ‘transaction’. Everyone has ‘lost’ something. All porn culminates but Amis is radical in his evocation simplistic. For Amis, pornography in the same thing, implicitly or of his characters’ vulnerability in is most stimulating when it is most explicitly, and only engages in the the face of daily illusions. Above intensely superficial. In his lover, perpetuation of desire. There is no all, television shapes their minds Selina, John Self finds the ‘thrilling human interaction, no possibility and defines the character of con- proof, so rich in pornography, that of resolution beyond the further temporary illusion. Keith Talent, in she does all this not for passion, expansion of fantasy. As Steve London Fields (1989), is a supreme not for comfort, far less for love, Cousins, one of Amis’s nastiest victim: but rather for money’. The fake, the creations, discovers in The Informa- act put on purely for appearances, Boy, did Keith burn that tube. tion (1995), is more acceptable than the real And that tube burnt him, nuked precisely because its impersonality He had found something that him, its cathodes crackling like most directly mimics and produces was all about sex. And nothing cancer. ‘TV,’ he thought, or more fantasy. Once, Self tells us, else . . . Pornography some- ‘Modern reality’ or ‘The world’. times tried to be about other It was the world of TV that …[Selina] made a noise I’d things, or to happen in other told him what the world was…. never heard her make before, settings. But all it could ever tell He couldn’t grade or filter it. So a rhythmical whimpering of you about these other things, he thought TV was real…an abandonment or entreaty, a lost these other settings, was that exemplary reality, all beautifully sound… they were all about sex too. and gracefully interconnected, ‘Hey,’ I said accusingly (I was And nothing else. where nothing hurts much joking, I think), ‘you’re not and nobody got old…beyond faking it!’ The fantasy world is hermetically a taut and twanging safety-net She looked startled, indignant. sealed off from any possibility of called money. ‘Yes I am,’ she said quickly. complication, and from those self- critical insights that might call upon In this sense, pornography is just To admit to something authentic values other than gratification. a specialised sub-set of television, is to admit a dangerous vulner- None of this is especially new, the ‘exemplary’ reality at its most ability which might be exploited – especially for a woman such as Selina, whose entire persona is a weapon in the struggle for success and money. A ‘lost sound’, an ‘en- treaty’, begins to ask deeper ques- tions which the interplay of illusion is engineered to repress. In conversation with Will Self, Amis speaks of modern people as ‘loose beings in search of a form’,2 and the bitter message of many of his novels is that this quest for form has become debased and ‘de- mocratised’ in the worst sense. In the world of Amis’ novels, popular culture homogenizes minds, dis- solving difference by answering every potential question with the Convent Grace Yu same unthinking activity. When michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 oxonian review of books page 15

John Self goes to see the ‘actress’ Butch Beausoleil, her performance echoes the contents of his head, ‘the stuff that hot fox was giving out, all miming so fluently with the pornography still fresh in my mind’. He is stuffed full of second-hand desires, his most basic urges and responses inflamed for the profit of others, and his ability to take control of his own life is fatally undermined by the absence of any meaningful human contact. Amis is a satirist and an extremist, and his novels often creak under the weight of their desire to address issues. Some of his recent works have been accused of sermonising, over-simplification and sentimentality (‘At the mention of children, the chip of ice in Amis’s heart turns into a Slush Puppy’,3 according to Christo- pher Tayler). Nevertheless, Amis continues to reward close reading with characteristic depth and integrity of observation. The one-liners rarely fail to ring true. ‘Fame had so democratised itself that obscurity was felt as a deprivation or even a punishment’ is an elegant variation, in Yellow Dog, on his common anxiety about cultural levelling. Pornography, too, continues to be richly, bitterly, and obsessively explored. It is an emblem of excess that, for Amis, serves the satirist’s purpose of stripping away veils and excuses, and offers a direct link to our brutal, animal aspects which society thrives upon exploiting. As John Self laments near the end of Money,

Television is working on us. Film is. We’re not continued from page 16 sure how yet. We wait, and count the symptoms. Orchards of Syon become a figure for grace untainted There’s a realism problem, we all know that. TV by the processes of history and the disgraces of the is real! some people think. And where does that public realm. Moments of quotidian beauty, ‘the slate leave reality? roofs briefly/ caught in scale-nets of silver’ become ‘signals’ of a ‘new-aligned/ poetry with truth, and This is the question Amis sets out to make us Syon’s Orchards/ uncannily of the earth’. Beyond, or answer. And, for all the mud that has been slung at his perhaps out the other side of, the demands that the work, it remains a question he demands we ask our- atrocities of history make on poetry, Hill concludes selves urgently, without recourse to illusion, and with a the sequence with a vision of full sense of contemporary social injustice. O the Orchards of Syon, neither wisdom Tom Chatfield is currently working on a DPhil looking at nor illusion of wisdom, not the late twentieth century and Martin Amis in particular. He also enjoys playing jazz piano and badminton, writes compensation, not recompense: the Orchards poetry, and is attempting to finish his first novel before of Syon whatever harvests we bring them. it finishes him. From a poet who has for so long, and so honestly, struggled with the difficulties of poetic recompense, with the spurious ‘illusion of wisdom’ that poetry can so temptingly offer, such an affirmation, however ten- Notes tative, is remarkable, and all the more arresting. O 1 J. G. Ballard, ‘Introduction’ to Crash (London, 1995), p. 6. 2 Will Self in conversation with Martin Amis, from Junk Mail by Will Self (London, 1996), pp. 381-2. 3 Christopher Taylor, reviewing Yellow Dog in the London Review of April Warman is beginning a DPhil on treatments of Books, 11th September 2003, vol. 25, no. 17, p. 12. death in contemporary poetry. page 16 oxonian review of books michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 Geoffrey Hill: The Orchards of Syon Hill, Geoffrey. Canaan. London: Penguin Books, Difficult to end joyful starting from here, 1996. 75 pages. but I’ll surprise us. The Triumph of Love. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 82 pages. hese lines, taken from near the end of The Orchards of Syon (2002), follow one of Geoffrey Hill’s frequent references to Speech! Speech! T Washington D.C.: Coun- some of the less humane moments of history (‘the Berlin Wall… terpoint, 2000. 60 pages. Carthage chemically defoliate’), but they could easily be applied to Hill’s own poetic trajectory over the past seven years. In 1996, The Orchards of Syon. Washington D.C.: Coun- the first lines of Canaan, Hill’s first book for more than a decade, terpoint, 2002. 72 pages. announced a significant shift in his conception of the poet’s role. They left behind the highly-wrought, self-involved lyrics for which he had become known, in favour of a mode of public denuncia- it is easier to follow threads of meaning tion, as in the poem ‘To the High Court of Parliament’: from poem to poem, to have some ap- prehension, if not full comprehension, of Where’s probity in this – what the Orchards of Syon might repre- the slither-frisk sent. to lordship of a kind Hill has said that the book is ‘concerned as rats to a bird-table? with forms and patterns of reconciliation’ The Triumph of Love (1998) and Speech! Speech! (2000) continued though with ‘numerous lapses and relapses Hill’s angry, almost unseemly, engagement with public life, or as throughout the sequence.’ This reconcili- he put it, his aspiration to ‘Active virtue: that which shall contain/ ation is attempted on many levels, includ- its own passion in the public weal.’ By Speech! Speech!, this civic pas- ing the relationship between Hill and his sion had come to seem so choked and obstructed by disgust that readers. The obnoxious chorus of ‘PEO- it was hard to see how Hill could continue, let alone ‘end joyful’. PLE’ in Speech! Speech! makes way for the Even the most positive reviewer was forced to describe Hill as ‘no appearance of a ‘you’, a non-antagonistic longer writing poetry but composing cryptic crossword clues’, and, interlocutor whom Hill can address with in this fair sample of the book, one can see his point: a degree of wistful goodwill: ‘Tell me, is this the way/ to the Orchards of Syon/ …Body where I left you thinking I would return?’ language my eye. Regarding the shrimp Hill also seems to be reconciling himself as predator: EYE TO EYE IT IS TRUE. to the polity which he has so deplored. He So it is with some trepidation that one begins The Orchards of relinquishes public protest, representing his Syon. One can never expect Hill to be easy, and a first reading of engaged self as a ‘public madman’, inviting his 72 uneasy, cryptic and often baffling poems yields a vague the reader instead, in his somewhat discon- tangle of impressions overlaid with a sense of a deep and watchful certing acquisition of youth-speak, to ‘Dig regret (shot through with moments of astonishing lyric intensity) the – mostly uncouth – language of grace’. for the tragedies of the past century, for the inadequacies of art Hill’s attempt at a reconciliation of and of his own life. But The Orchards of Syon does represent a kind language with grace is perhaps the most of loosening. The clenched, convulsive 12-line units of Speech! unexpected aspect of The Orchards of Syon. Speech! have relaxed into a freer, more flowing sequence of 24-line While the inevitable collusion of language poems. While the poems themselves can at first each seem like a with evil has been an almost overwhelming collection of bizarre non-sequiturs (what is one to make of ‘As preoccupation of Hill’s early work, in this for posterity,/ whose lips are sealed, I do prefer/ Polish to Czech latest sequence he looks beyond a stifling though, not speaking/ either language, I am unable to say/ why’?), assumption of culpability. The eponymous continued on page 16

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