Review Saturday 28 August 2021 – Issue № 188

‘There’s no such thing as too judgmental’ — Fran Lebowitz talks to Hadley Freeman

‘For so many years, books were a home for me. I wanted to write the kind Review of story with open arms, Saturday 28 August 2021 – Issue № 188 with room for everyone who might want to come in.’ — Madeline Miller, page 26

Contents The week in books ...... 04 The books that made me by Chris Riddell ...... 05

COVER STORY Fran Lebowitz talks to Hadley Freeman...... 06

Book of the week: Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth ...... 10 Nonfi ction reviews The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen and The Man Who Mistook His Job for His Life: How to Thrive at Work by Leaving Your Emotional Bagg age Behind by Naomi Shragai ...... 12 Crude Britannia: How Oil Shaped a Nation by James Marriott & Terry Macalister ...... 13 Tunnel 29: The True Story of an Extraordinary Escape Beneath the Berlin Wall by Helena Merriman ...... 14 Strangers on a Pier: A Portrait of a Family by Tash Aw ...... 15 Fiction reviews More Than I Love My Life by David Grossman ...... 16 The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach by Jas Treadwell ...... 17 What You Can See from Here by Mariana Leky ...... 17 Children and teenagers’ books of the month ...... 18

INTERVIEW Activist and author Rafi a Zakaria takes on white feminism ...20

BOOKS ESSAY Lara Feigel on her lockdown with DH Lawrence ...... 22

INSIDE STORY The mystery of how humans learned to talk ...... 24

Madeline Miller on writing The Song of Achilles, plus Tom Gauld ...... 26

COVER PHOTOGRAPH Adrienne Grunwald Saturday 28 August 2021 The Guardian 3 ¶ Forewords

that centres the Earth’s ström, managing The week in books sustainability.” director of Moomin Alison Flood Characters, said: 28 August “We have made a long- Read Hour term commitment to launches in UK helping spark a love of An initiative that reading and writing in Future Library In 2114 the trees will encourages people to young people around continues to grow be cut down, and the spend an hour of their the globe.” Lucy Knight The acclaimed Zimbab- works will be printed day reading is coming wean writer Tsitsi on them. Dangarembga, to the UK for the fi rst Dylan Thomas Dangarembga is work- who recently won the time this year. recording on sale ing on a new piece that PEN Pinter prize, said : Launched three A copy of the 1952 will remain unseen “Communicating years ago in Finland, recording of Dylan until 2114. through the project Read Hour is celebrated Thomas that is credited The novelist (pic- with those who will be annually on 8 September, with launching the tured), whose latest present in a hundred the UN’s inter national audiobook industry in work This Mour nable years’ time is thrilling literacy day. the US is being sold Body was short listed for and a privilege . The offi cial Read Hour by the rare bookseller the Booker prize in 2020, The Future Library will take place between Peter Harrington. has been named as the project perfectly 2pm and 3pm, but any- The recording was eighth author to con- expresses my yearning one unable to take part made by Barbara Hold- tribute to the Future for a human culture can join in at another ridge and Marianne Library project. time. The UK launch will Roney, founders of It was dreamed up be supported by Water- Caedmon Records, by the Scottish artist stones, Macmillan who asked if they could Katie Paterson, and the children’s books and tape a public reading organic artwork is cur- Oxfam, as well as the that Thomas gave in New rently represented by comedian Jennifer York. The resulting LP 1,000 trees, planted in Saunders and children’s went on to sell more the forest near Oslo in authors Cressida Cowell than 400,000 copies. 2014, and a collection and Philip Ardagh. Th is copy, which is of seven manuscripts, Finland’s most inscribed by the Welsh by authors including successful literary poet with the words Margaret Atwood, Karl products, the Moomins, “My name rhymes with Ove Knausg ård and Elif are the “face” of Read villain, I do hope you Shafak, which are being Hour’s international enjoy!!!”, is being sold

AARON UFUMELI/APA; ST-IMAGES / ALAMY / ST-IMAGES UFUMELI/APA; AARON held in trust . launch. Roleff Kråk- for £2,750 . AF Chipmageddon WORD OF THE WEEK As if there weren’t enough disasters, people are now speaking of the present Steven Poole “chipmageddon”: the worldwide shortage of micropro cessors that is aff ecting supplies of everything from toasters and games consoles to cars. A silicon “chip” was thus named in the early 1960s simply because it is a small fl at piece of material, like a chip of wood or stone – or, of course, potato – separated by a cutting action (the verb “chop” is related). In a modern chip factory, a small circular wafer of silicon is divided into many chips, each one holding billions of transistors, which is an improvement on the few thousand possible in the early 70s. The ever-fl exible “-mageddon” suffi x, meanwhile – as in snowmageddon or carmageddon – ultimately takes its form from the Hebrew place name Megiddo in the Book of Revelation’s account of the end of days. Those worried about the climate might not think that a slowdown in the number of new cars being built really counts as the end of the world, but even they might be alarmed by the fact that supply-chain issues recently caused Nando’s to close many of its outlets temporarily. Chipmageddon and chickmageddon? Where will it end ?

4 The Guardian Saturday 28 August 2021 The books that made me ¶

The book that changed my mind ‘Maurice Sendak taught us The Anarchy by William Dalrymple, a comprehensive playfulness could be profound’ history of the East India Company and the despoiling of the Indian subcontinent over four centuries. It Chris Riddell changed the cosy assumptions I was taught at school about the British empire . The last book that made me cry The book I am currently reading Michael Rosen’s Sad Book: a picture book that James Holland’s magnifi cent Sicily ’43, fi lled with chronicles his grief at the death of his son Eddie from fi rst-hand testimonies from private soldiers, meningitis at the age of 19. It is beautifully illustrated generals, future princes and Hollywood movie stars. by the great Quentin Blake and is profoundly moving The book that changed my life and poetic. The Hobbit by JR R Tolkien. It was read to my class by The last book that made me laugh our teacher. I missed the battle of the fi ve armies at The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas the end because I had fl u, so I borrowed the book Adams, which I read in order to illustrate a new from the school library and never looked back. It edition during lockdown. turned me into an avid reader. The book I couldn’t fi nish The book I wish I’d written The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, a novel that is so Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. It is poorly written that it fails to be so bad it is good, and the perfect picture book, as fresh and beguiling now is simply bad. as the day it was written. Sendak taught a generation The book I’m ashamed not to have read of author-illustrators that simplicity and playfulness Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, although I did listen to could also be profound. an unabridged audio book (with more than 20 CDs) The book that most infl uence d my work and loved it. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. As My earliest reading memory a child I was captured by Sir John Tenniel’s illustra- Struggling through the staid adventures of Peter tions . My favourite was the white rabbit staring at his and Jane . I then found a copy of Agaton Sax and the pocket watch. As I copied that drawing, I knew that Diamond Thieves by Nils-Olof Franzén, illustrated I wanted to be an illustrator when I grew up. by Blake, on my teacher’s desk and Peter and Jane The book I think is most underrated were dead to me. Knight’s Fee by Rosemary Sutcliff . I could have chosen any of her magnifi cent historical novels . Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, illustrated

JIM HOLDEN/ALAMY JIM Sutcliff is a great stylist . by Chris Riddell, is published by Macmillan.

Saturday 28 August 2021 The Guardian 5 ¶ Label

‘If people disagree with me, so what?’

6 The Guardian Saturday 28 August 2021 Cover story ¶

In the 1970s when she did write, and wrote hilar- ious, elegant columns for Andy Warhol’s Inter view magazine as well as the best selling books of collected With a hit Netfl ix series essays, Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981), she would hold her own on talkshows, against and The Fran Lebowitz male hosts and guests who demanded to know when she would get married and then off ered to impreg- Reader now published in nate her . Lebowitz, a lesbian , just smiled and smoked her cigarettes. the UK, the American wit One of the leitmotifs in Martin Scorsese’s second and most recent documentary about her, Pretend It’s talks to Hadley Freeman a City, are the shots of a solitary Lebowitz strolling around New York in her distinctive uniform of a long about failing to write, overcoat, Levi’s 501s and loafers, observing every- thing and detached from it all. So doesn’t she resent her dislike of Andy that her aversion to technology now makes her so dependent on others? “No, I just think, isn’t it lucky I have friends who have these things and can do them Warhol and her best for me?” she says, with the smile of one who has arranged her life exactly as she wants it to be. friend Toni Morrison Today, Lebowitz has become what is commonly described as a “public speaker” (Scorsese’s fi rst documentary about her is titled Public Speaking). ran Lebowitz is a famous writer who But really she is an extremely successful wit, and famously doesn’t write. “I’m really certainly the most celebrated American female wit lazy and writing is really hard and I since Dorothy Parker – although, unlike Parker, she don’t like to do hard things,” she says, doesn’t write (or drink). She makes witty observa tions, and it’s the rare writer who would and people pay to hear them. This is very diff erent F not have some sympathy with that. from being a comedian, because Lebowitz is not a Yet, as all writers also know, writer’s joker, and she certainly doesn’t script her thoughts. block, which the 70-year-old has suff ered from for She is an off -the-cuff opinion-haver, and people all four decades now, is never really about laziness. over the world – pandemic permitting, she will Lebowitz’s editor Erroll McDonald (“the man with embark on a massive European tour next year – fl ock the easiest job in New York”) has said she suff ers to hear her quick-witted opinions on everything from “excessive reverence for the written word”. from holidays (“How horrible must your life be if you Given that Lebowitz has, at last count, more than think: ‘You know what would be fun? Let’s take the 11,000 of them in her apartment, there is no question kids to the airport, sit there for a few hours and get that she loves books. “I would never throw away a yelled at’”) to whether it matters if people relate to book – there are human beings I would rather throw a book’s protag o nist: “A book is not a mirror – it’s a out of the window,” she says. So is this talk of “exces- door,” she declares in Pretend It’s a City. sive reverence ” a euphemistic way of saying that she So it never bothered her when she was growing up has low self-esteem and doesn’t think she can write in New Jersey that she didn’t see too many suburban anything good enough to commit to print? Jewish lesbians in novels? She makes a loud bark of “I don’t think I suff er from low self-esteem,” laughter: “I never would have thought about it, not cackles Lebowitz. “I know a lot of people object to in a million years! I’m not really a revolutionary, I’m me because they think I’m too judg mental, although more of a dandy. I never thought: ‘How can I change I think there’s no such thing. But as judgmental as the world?’ I thought: ‘How can I do what I want  I am about others, I am far more so about my own work. I think it’s a paralysing professionalism.” Lebowitz and I are talking by phone, which means she is on her landline in her New York apartment, I never thought: because as well as refusing to write, Lebowitz refuses ‘How can I to own a mobile, wifi or even a computer. During change the lockdown, when all of her beloved bookstores were world?’ I thought: shut, she had to rely on a friend to order books online ‘How can I do for her, and she then sent her friend cheques. When what I want I interviewed her for a public event by Zoom during without lockdown , she had to go to David Sedaris ’s apartment to use his computer. And yet Lebowitz, 70, has going to jail?’ always seemed like such a self-suffi cient, indepen- dent person.

PHOTOGRAPH Adrienne Grunwald Saturday 28 August 2021 The Guardian 7 ¶ Cover story Fran Lebowitz

 without going to jail?’” For a while in the 1980s York Times ran a column headlined “Everybody and 90s, Lebowitz promised that she was working Loves Fran. But Why?”, in which the writer expressed on a novel. mystifi cation as to why Lebowitz, with her “misan- “There are about a hundred pages,” she says, when thropic, cranky, besotted view of Manhattan life”, is I ask about it. “But whole generations have come and so popular with young people. “She determines that gone since I last looked at it.” When it became clear wellness must be an idea imported from – and here is that waiting for Lebowitz’s novel was as futile as the moment to clutch your bagels – ‘California’,” the waiting for Godot, her US publishers had the bright journalist wrote with an audible eye roll. idea of combining Metropolitan Life and Social I ask Lebowitz if she was hurt by the column. “You Studies into one book and selling that, titled The Fran expect critics, and this was hardly the fi rst time I got Lebowitz Reader. Despite now being over 40 years bad press. But I thought that specifi c thing that you’re old, the essays still glitter, every bone-dry sentence referring to was very antisemitic, and that is the last pared down and packed with her unmistakeable thing you’re still allowed to do. My editor called me person ality. Starved of any new Lebowitz content, and he said: ‘Don’t you think this is antisemitic?’ and her fans have taken to quoting lines from the Reader he’s not Jewish, so his sensitivity is not as high as like religious texts: “All God’s children are not mine. But I heard that a lot of people were talking beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely about [the article] online and I’ll tell you what pres entable … Generally speaking, I look upon surprises me is how people, who are totally unrelated sports as danger ous and tiring activities performed to whatever’s being written about, will take these by people with whom I share nothing except the huge sides over things,” she says. right to trial by jury.” I say it feels as if today people see opinions as a It has never gone out of print in the US and, at last, statement of who they are, and therefore a disagree- it is now being published in the UK. This is surely a ment of opinion feels seismic. “I think that’s true. testament to the success of Pretend It’s a City, which It’s replaced morality. But I never cared what people was a big lockdown hit for Netfl ix. “I’m pretty sure I think of what I think. I’m not saying I don’t care what profi ted from the virus because I think many people people think about me, because I’m human. But if watched my series because they weren’t allowed people disagree with me, so what? I’ve never under- out,” she says. However, it balances out because stood why [my opinions] anger people. I have no Lebowitz, who lives on her own, had no income during power, I’m not the mayor of New York, I’m not the pandemic after all her speaking engagements making laws. These are just opinions!” were cancelled: “That was stressful. I became a She grew up in New Jersey, the elder daughter of person standing in the supermarket going: ‘Why are furniture upholsterers. She was bookish but a terrible grapes so expensive? What is this, Cartier?’” student, and was repeatedly expelled from school for Pretend It’s a City, which Lebowitz co-produced, what she has described as “nonspecifi c surliness”. should buy her more than a couple of bunches of I ask her when she knew she was gay. “This is some- grapes. Over the course of seven delightful and unex- thing that’s very hard to explain to young people pectedly lyrical episodes, viewers watched her do today. Being gay, it was illegal then. Forget fi ghting nothing other than share her acerbic opinions with for gay marriage, how about just trying not to go to Scorsese, who chortles away in the background. jail? So you never saw it, it was never talked about, it When Saturday Night Live parodied Pretend It’s a didn’t exist in the world. So if I had not seen occas- City , comedian Bowen Yang, as Lebowitz, barked out ional mentions of it in books, I would never have aperçus such as “People ask me: ‘Should I be a heard of it. I had a friend who grew up in a very blue- writer?’ And I say: ‘No! Be something useful! Be! A collar environment in Wilmington, Delaware, and piece! Of melon! Wrapped in! A prosciutto!’” Kyle she thought she was the only [lesbian] in the world, Mooney, as Scorsese, promptly has a heart attack and that was a common thing then. next to her from hysteria. “I have a very vivid memory of when I was 12 and Lebowitz did not see the parody (“I can’t stand to in the backyard reading, watch myself”) but I ask if Scorsese laughs as much and I remember having with her off -camera as he does on. “I always struck this exact thought: ‘Well, Marty as funny, I don’t know why. But Marty is also ‘I really enjoy I suppose if there’s such a really funny,” she says fondly. (When Scorsese was the speaking thing in the world as les- making The Wolf of Wall Street, he cast the famously engagements. bians then someone has judgmental Lebowitz as the judge who sends It’s not work, to be them. But why does Leonardo DiCaprio to prison – an in-joke between it’s everyone it have to be me?’ Because pals.) Pretend It’s a City is nominated for an Emmy, having to listen I instantly knew that I for outstanding nonfi ction series, and Netfl ix is very could not live like that in keen that its star goes to the event in September. But to my opinions, the world I was living in, Lebowitz is not tempted: “The Emmys are in LA,” and that’s all and I was pretty happy in she says. No elaboration necessary. I ever wanted’ that world. Of course, what With the bouquets, however, come the brickbats. most people did was they At the height of Pretend It’s a City’s success, the New stayed in that world and

8 The Guardian Saturday 28 August 2021 Cover story ¶

Lebowitz’s people Clockwise from left: with Martin Scorsese; with Andy Warhol – ‘We never talked that much’; Toni Morrison was one of her best friends for almost 40 years

pretended to be straight, but that never occurred atmosphere that I wanted to me.” Given that homosexuality was a crime then, to be around. I saw him was she ever scared of being arrested? “It was never every day for years, but we scary for me because the police were mostly arresting never talked that much.” gay men, because that infuriated them more [than In her last year of working lesbians]. Truthfully, I was more afraid of my parents at Interview, Warhol paid [fi nding out].” her in paintings. Lebowitz mentions her parents and especially her Alas, she liked his mother in her public talks often, and always very paintings about as much as fondly. When did she come out to them? “We never she liked him, and so she discussed it,” she says. “I mean, they were aware of sold them cheaply to pay the rent, and two weeks it, I brought girlfriends home, but we never talked later he died, sending his prices stratospheric. “I will about it. That was because of me, but it was also me always believe that he did that deliberately,” she says. knowing they didn’t want to .” What, died? “Yes, he knew I’d sold them and he said What is she like as a girlfriend? “Terrible. Terrible! to himself: ‘This’ll show her!’” I loathe domestic life and I’m not the monogamous Toni Morrison was one of her best friends for type. I’m really great for, like, the fi rst three months, almost 40 years, up until Morrison’s death in 2019. and that’s how long it lasts for me .” So is three In clips of them talking on stage, Lebowitz looks months her longest relationship? “Well, I’ve been uncharacteristically awestruck by her, while Morri son with people for longer, but I wasn’t being a good giggles delightedly at everything she says. “People girlfriend. I’m a terrible girlfriend, but I’m a don’t know how fun Toni was because she had such great friend.” an intimidating presence, but she was really fun,” Pretty much as soon as she arrived in New York, says Lebowitz a little wistfully. Did it take a while as a teenage high school dropout determined to be a to get past that intimidating presence? “No, it was writer, she was making friends. She was hanging out an instantaneous friendship. I don’t know how in Studio 54 and Warhol’s The Factory, but she never to describe it, but it was like falling in love, except felt intimidated. “Social situations don’t frighten it lasted .” me,” she says. Susan Graham Ungaro, the editor of When Lebowitz was 12 her mother told her, “Don’t the fi rst magazine where she worked, happened to be be funny around boys. They don’t like it.” That was going out with (and later married to) the jazz music- only one of the many rules she went out and broke. ian Charles Mingus. In Pretend It’s a City, Lebowitz Lebowitz is the opinionated older woman young describes taking Mingus to her parents’ house for people love; the lesbian whose sexuality has never Thanksgiving, and Mingus taking her out for break- been subjected to debate or scrutiny; the high school fast with Duke Ellington. dropout who washed up in New York and instantly While working at Interview, she became friends became a famous writer; the writer who doesn’t with the notoriously unfriendly Lou Reed. “I mean, write. But doesn’t she regret giving up the writing, Lou was diffi cult, no one would ever say he wasn’t given she was such a natural? She hesitates a diffi cult. We had a real fi ght the fi rst time we met. fraction: “Not consciously. Maybe unconsciously, But, you know, we liked each other,” she says. One though how would I know?” Then her rhythm picks person she didn’t especially like was Warhol himself. up as she fi nds her patter again: “But I really enjoy “I noticed that Andy sought out people who were the speaking engagements. It’s not work, it’s every- very fragile psychologically, and he encouraged one having to listen to my opinions, and that’s all

NETFLIX; CURTIS KNAPPGETTY IMAGES; TODD PLITTGETTY IMAGES PLITTGETTY TODD IMAGES; KNAPPGETTY CURTIS NETFLIX; people to take drugs, so it was not really an I ever wanted” •

Saturday 28 August 2021 The Guardian 9 the science of people’s souls – a daunting task. Book of All of this, of course, makes consciousness one of the most exciting scientifi c frontiers . Seth has been the week researching the cognitive basis of consciousness for more than two decades and has pioneered new ways of analysing the inscrutable and measuring the incalcu- lable in his quest to deduce the constituents of our feelings down to their atomic basis. This much-antici- { Science } Our world and pated book lays out his radical theory of our invented the self are constructions reality with accessible and compelling writing. We take for granted the idea that we journey of the brain, a pioneering through life as the starring character in our own bio- neuroscientist argues pic. But this hallucination is generated by our minds, Seth explains. The brain is a “prediction machine” Gaia Vince that is constantly generating best-guess causes of its sensory inputs. The mind generates our “reality” based on the predictions it makes from visual, auditory and For every stoner who has other sensory information, and then verifi es and been overcome with pro- modulates it through sensory information updates. found insight and drawled, These perceptual expectations shape our conscious “Reality is a construct, experience. When we agree with each other about maaan,” here is the aston- our hallucinations we call it “reality”; when we don’t ishing affi rmation. Reality – we’re described as “delusional” . or, at least, our perception Sometimes these disagreements can help us to peek Being You: A of it – is a “controlled past what William Blake called the “doors of percep- New Science of hallucination”, according tion”. One such discombobulating event that you may Consciousness to the neuroscientist Anil have experienced was #TheDress : an overexposed by Anil Seth, Seth. Everything we see, photo posted on social media in 2015, in which a Faber, £20 hear and perceive around striped dress looked blue and black to some people, us, our whole world , is a and white and gold to others. The version that people big lie created by our brains, like a forever version of saw depended on whether their brain had taken into The Truman Show, to placate us into living our lives. account an adjustment for ambient lighting. People Our minds invent for us a universe of colours, who spent more time indoors were more likely to see sounds, shapes and feelings through which we inter- the dress as blue and black, because their prediction act with our world and relate to each other, Seth argues. machine was primed to factor in yellowish lighting We even invent ourselves. Our reality is an illusion, when preparing the hallucination. Those who spend and understanding this involves tackling the thorny more time outside have brains primed to adjust for issue of consciousness : what it means to, well, be. the bluer spectrum of sunlight. Consciousness has long been the preserve of The dress phenomenon, Seth argues, is “compel ling philosophers and priests, poets and artists; now evidence that our perceptual experiences of the neuroscientists are investigating the mysterious world are internal constructions, shaped by the quality and trying to answer the hard question of how idiosyncrasies of our personal biology and history”. consciousness arises in the fi rst place. If this all sounds In objective, non-hallucinated reality, though, the a bit hard going, it’s actually not at all in the masterly dress doesn’t have physical properties of blueness, hands of Seth, who deftly weaves the philosophical, blackness, whiteness or goldness. Colour is not a physi- biological and personal with a lucid clarity and cal property of things in the way that mass is. Rather, coherence that is thrilling to read. objects have particular ways that they refl ect light Consciousness, which Seth defi nes as “any kind of that our brains include in subjective experience whatsoever”, is central to our Seth deftly their complex Technicolor being and identity. What does it mean for you to be weaves the production of “reality”. you, as opposed to being a stone or a bat ? And how philosophical, “We perceive the world does this feeling of being you emerge from the squishy biological and not as it is, but as it is useful conglomeration of cells we keep in our skulls? Science to us,” Seth writes. In other has shied away from these sorts of experiential personal with words, we evolved this questions, partly because it’s not obvious how a lucid clarity generated reality because science’s tools could explore them. Scientists are and coherence oper ating through our fond of pursu ing “objective” truths and realities, that is thrilling hallucinated world improves not probing the perspectival realms of subjectivity to read our survival, by helping us to seek the truth of nostalgia, joy or the perfect avoid danger and recognise blueness of an Yves Klein canvas. Also, it’s hard. Seth food, for example. might use other words, but essentially, he is exploring This is still an emerging

10 The Guardian Saturday 28 August 2021 Book of the week ¶ ALLSTAR/PARAMOUNT

science and Seth gently walks us through the optical The world is a ‘big lie’ we perceive our selves to be illusions, magic tricks and fas cinating experi ments Jim Carrey in The crying. Likewise, we are fear- that build his case. We are, his research shows, much Truman Show ful because we perceive our more likely to perceive things we expect. In a study in heart is beating faster – a which people were shown fl ashes of diff erent images survival mechanism to ready us to respond to a threat in their left and right eyes, hearing a cue for an image picked up by the visual cortex, for instance. Our feel- meant they were more likely to “see” that image yet ings, even much of our experience of free will, are also be unconscious of the competing image shown to the hallucinations issued by the mind to control ourselves. other eye. Sometimes, our halluc in ated world is wildly The self, then, is another perception, a controlled out of sync with everyone else’s – we lose our grip on hallucination built up from an assemblage of percep- reality. “What we call a ‘hallucination’ is what happens tual best-guesses, prior beliefs and memories. Seth when perceptual priors are unusu ally strong, over- recounts the story of a talented musicologist who whelming the sensory data so that the brain’s grip on suff ered catas trop hic memory loss. The loss of mem- their causes in the world starts to slide.” ory disrupted the continuity of his self percep tion – his Seth has experimented with shifting his own reality “narrative self” – eroding his personal identity. – he describes using virtual reality headsets and taking We perceive ourselves to control ourselves is Seth’s LSD. I learn to my surprise that hallucinogens really often counter intuitive but nevertheless convincing do take you to a higher level of consciousness – your argument . However, we are just as importantly the amount of consciousness can now be measured perception of others. Seth mentions that we modulate independently from wakefulness. This has had life- our behaviour in response to our perceptions of what changing consequences, Seth explains, enabling others may be thinking about us, but the social con text “locked-in” patients to be recognised as conscious, of our “self” is far more important than that. We are despite their apparently inert state. to a great extent the invention of others’ minds. What then is the ground zero of consciousness in a Being you, after all, is not just about the sentience living being – or indeed, an artifi cial one? At its most you experience, but also the youness of you. By the fundamental, it’s an awareness of self, knowing where time my beloved grandfather died of a stroke in 2012, you end and the rest of the world’s matter begins, I’d already grieved for him for two years. Dementia and Seth explores a diversity of self-perception from had taken a smart, funny, gentle man and left us with parrots to octopuses – whose suckers attach to almost a stranger, who lashed out or spoke inappropriately everything but their own skin, because they can taste and unkindly – he was not himself. themselves. He interrogates self-knowledge from That said, Being You is an exhilarating book: a vast- inside out, dismantling the idea that our emotions pro- ranging, phenomenal achievement that will duce bodily expressions, such as tears. Instead, Seth undoubtedly become a seminal text. argues, our emotions are a response to the mind’s per ception of our bodily reac tions: we are sad because To buy a copy for £17.40 go to guardianbookshop.com.

Saturday 28 August 2021 The Guardian 11 workers, potters, priests, musicians and scribes. In Nonfi ction these early cities, administrative centres took care of the workers and handled “the redistribution of goods”. This was often on a rather paternalistic model. Ashur- nasirpal II of Assyria invited 69,574 guests to a banquet that lasted 10 days. In Mesopotamia, by about 1000 BC , there were wage workers, self-employed people, subcontractors and slaves. Combined with the reci- { Society } Two books about pro cal and “tributary” mod els of labour relations work  one a fascinating history (“tributary” being based on obligation to the state, with non-monetary reward), these are, he asserts, the of humankind, the other a six categories of labour relations. “From this point,” guide to surviving office life he says, “the history of work may be conceived as an endless shift between these basic forms.” Christina Patterson Much of it sounds gruelling, but there’s nothing new about pride in a job well done. “I am a craftsman who excels in his art and is at the forefront of knowledge,” Hunting is hard. You have says one Egyptian Lucassen quotes, from 2000 BC . He to run fast, for miles, often boasts about his under standing of hieroglyphs around in the heat of the day. You 3,500 years before Gutenberg presented his printing have to keep your eyes fi xed press. But book printing, Lucassen explains, was fi rmly on your prey. You invented before Gutenberg in China and Korea in the must cooperate with fellow 8th century AD. Manuals for agricultural and textile hunters as, if you don’t, technology were, apparently, extremely popular. The Story of Work: you won’t eat. For 98% of Lucassen takes us on a breakneck journey from the A New History human history, hunting fi rst strike, by workmen at a temple during the reign of Humankind and gathering has been of Ramesses III, to the stage-managed productivity of by Jan Lucassen, our work. Work was never Aleksei G Stakhanov in Stalinist Russia, and from Inca Yale, £25 a picnic and it isn’t now. irrigation (and human sacrifi ce) to the Amazon that Writing this book cer- now seems to rule the world. The breadth of the The Man Who tainly can’t have been. Jan scholarship is breathtaking, but the prose is clear with Mistook His Lucassen, a Dutch historian dashes of dry wit. After quot ing the utopian refl ections Job for His Life: and author of a number of of the Chinese historian Sima Qian (c 145-86BC) on the How to Thrive at books on globalisation and goods that “will naturally fl ow forth ceaselessly” from Work by Leaving migration, has set himself a worker who “delights in his own business”, Lucassen Your Emotional a task that makes stalking observes wryly: “Another Chinese literate preferred to Baggage Behind mammoths look quite point to the reality, rather than theory, and expressed by Naomi Shragai, simple. He has set out to compassion for his toiling compatriots.” WH Allen, £16.99 chronicle the history of Lucassen’s own compassion shines through this work, from our fi rst strides magisterial book: for all those who have and continue as Homo sapiens to the rise of the robot. The result is to toil in tough conditions , often with minimal reward. an encyclop edic survey that’s also a whistle-stop tour One of the most shocking themes to emerge is the scale of human history – and it is fascinating. of slavery. Between 900 and 600 BC , the Assyrian It all seems to have started pretty well. We ran. empire deported more than 4.5 million men, women We jumped. We chased. We ate. We shared our food. We may even have shared the childcare. And then we started sowing crops and herding goats. Agriculture was born and, with it, greater gender and societal inequality. “Better-nourished mothers”, Lucassen writes, “had more babies” and spent more time in childcare. Some households had bigger yields and these “aggrandizers” could take on non-agricultural crafts and sometimes leadership roles. The seeds were sown for the stratifi ed societies we live in now. It would be easy to see how a history of work span- ning such a vast timeframe could be full of vague extrapolations from archaeological studies, but it’s the detail that makes this so gripping. In Urukin Mesopotamia (now Iraq), in the fourth millennium BC, for example, there were leather workers, washer-

GRAPHICAARTISGETTY GRAPHICAARTISGETTY men, reed workers, barbers, weavers, builders, metal

12 The Guardian Saturday 28 August 2021 Nonfi ction ¶ and children, set to work as prisoners of war. Slavery seems to have existed in most soc ieties and been con- { Environment } A story of doned by most religions, including Christianity and missed opportunities and Islam. Most voices have been silenced, but Lucassen quotes a few. One is a man called Oluale Kossola, who industrial decline is told told the American writer Zora Neale Hurston how he with rare insight and vivacity was captured in Benin in 1860 at the age of 19. “My eyes dey stop cryin’,” he said, “but de tears runnee down Conrad Landin inside me all de time.” For most of us in the modern workplace, our tears are usually for reasons that are more banal. We don’t This November the eyes of like our boss. We didn’t get a pay rise. Our performance the world will turn to Glas- review didn’t go well. These are the focus of Naomi gow. “Cop26 meeting is last Shragai’s book The Man Who Mistook His Job for His chance, says Alok Sharma Life. “The workplace is a theatre,” she says, “where as he backs UK’s plan for everyone is acting out their own unique family drama new oil and gas fi elds,” the while simultaneously attempting to cooperate and Observer reported. The con- deliver results.” Crude Britannia: tradiction in this sen tence is For some of us, even the phrase “deliver results” How Oil Shaped all the proof you need of the is enough to send a shiver down the spine. This is a a Nation central themes of Crude Brit- book geared fi rmly towards business and the o ce. by James Marriott annia: that Britain’s econ- Shragai is a psychotherapist and executive coach who & Terry Macalister, omic pros perity is inextric- helps businesses and people with work-related prob- Pluto, £20 ably linked to oil, and that lems. It’s a self-help book, complete with exer cises breaking this link appears and tips. I didn’t do them, but then I don’t have a more distant prospect than human extinction. colleagues or a boss. This book reminded me why. Journeying through landscapes of rigs and refi ner- Felicity is enraged when her boss promotes an ies, campaigner James Marriott and former Guardian underqualifed but attractive colleague over her. energy editor Terry Macalister interweave history William lives in fear of missing an email. Melissa is a and psychogeography. One theme is how oil made “neurotic overachiever” who worked 18 hours a day pop music. Some examples seem contrived, but not until her hair fell out. Shragai tells their stories and “Stanlow”, released in 1980 by Orchestral Manoeu vres other s in order to make wider points about fear of in the Dark. The song opens with a recording of a rejection, narcissistic bosses, o ce envy, control freaks diesel pump at the Merseyside refi nery of the same and bullies. What can sound trivial in the telling can, name. After reading Marriott and Macalister’s soul- of course, seem Shakespearean to the teller. Shragai stirring interviews with former refi nery workers and shows how change often begins with understanding. OMD’s Andy McCluskey , whose father worked there, She is wise, experienced and often gives good advice. it becomes impossible to see the name Stanlow The trouble is that quite a lot of it will feel pretty basic. without hearing echoes of the band’s “intriguingly M ore compelling are the melancholic” melody. Bad day at the o ce glimpses of Shragai’s own As the authors say, it’s “a premonition” – of the Our problems at life: “dying” on stage in her industrial decline and missed opportunities, when work can seem trivial former career as a standup Margaret Thatcher used tax revenues from oil to compared to those comedian; memories of her cushion rising unem ployment while placing the North of our ancestors Hungarian father, who was Sea in the hands of international capital. It’s a story liberated from Ausch witz, that is told too rarely, and Marriott and Macalis ter acquired a mobile home park in California, lost all the should be commended for giving it such vivacity. money he made and spent his last years doing charity Crude Britannia can also be a harrowing read. The work dressed as Santa Claus. Shragai has clearly had a authors shine a spotlight on the framing and execu tion fascinating life and I wanted to hear about more of it. of the “Ogoni Nine” who had protested against Shell She has certainly had a more interesting time than pipelines in Nigeria. Shell continues to deny involve- most of the clients she describes. ment, but in 2009 the company paid out £9.7 m in The Man Who Mistook His Job for His Life could well compensation to the activists’ families as part of a help some people who are struggling at work. I hope “process of reconciliation ” . it does. As Lucassen points out, “most people on this Climate campaigners are forging new cult ural planet spend more than half of their waking hours identities around renewable energy, but govern- working”. That’s a big chunk of a life. I suppose we ments have failed to secure jobs in Britain as should just be grateful if we’re paid for it. fabrication contracts go overseas. With oil defying past expectations of scarcity, perhaps it’s no wonder To buy The Story of Work for £21.75 or The Man Who we can’t let go. Mistook His Job for His Life for £14.78 go to guardianbookshop.com . To buy a copy for £17.40 go to guardianbookshop.com.

Saturday 28 August 2021 The Guardian 13 ¶ Nonfi ction

journalist and broadcaster Helena Merriman found the { History } For Berlin’s perfect medium to bring the story to a new audience. heroic diggers, the route Her book retains most of the qualities that led her podcast to be downloaded more than 6m times. to freedom was a 135-metre For the tunnellers and the escapees, the route to tunnel beneath the Wall freedom involved a slow crawl through an intensely confi ned space, less than 3ft by 3ft, and Merriman Philip Oltermann excels at recreating the physicality of their experi- ences: the smell of dense clay, the click-clack of a woman walking on the street above in high heels. It was a plan that seemed The fear of water rushing in, of Stasi listening devices to defy not just caution embedded in the soil, of border guards digging down but geography: to build a to meet and greet them with a stick of dynamite. tunnel to help East Germans As the stubborn clay demands sturdier, more escape to the west – in cold expensive tools, the tunnel grows from a private war Berlin, of all places. enterprise into a project that is tolerated, if not directly The German capital is funded, by American journalists, West German poli ti- Tunnel 29: The mainly built on oozing wet cal parties, police and the CIA – meaning its discovery True Story of an sand that requires eff ort to would not just have dashed the hopes of the escapees Extraordinary keep it in place. There are but risked creating a geopolit ical crisis. Merriman Escape Beneath elevated areas, such as the hitches her story to a band of protagonists – digger the Berlin Wall district of Wedding, where Joachim Rudolph, wannabe escapees Renate and by Helena Merriman, the groundwater level is Wolfdieter Stern heimer , spy Siegfried Uhse – and Hodder, £20 lower and the earth more expertly ups the tempo until the narrative tension fi rm, but after 1961 that part is as taut as in a thriller. of the city also happened to be one where houses on Because the publication of Tunnel 29 coincides with either side of the Iron Curtain stood furthest apart, the 60th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall, by Bernauer Straße. Tunnelling here underneath the Merriman has front-loaded her book with some “death strip” – the heavily guarded corridor between broader historical context, and this is where the the walls – looked like a suicide mission. adaptation from audio to text works least smoothly. And yet, in four months during the summer of The present tense serves the author well to describe 1962, a group of daredevil diggers achieved the seem- the thud-thwack of the tunnellers, but when it comes ingly impossible: constructing a 135-metre tunnel to the tick-tock of geopolitics it can have a dulling that ran between a factory building in the west and a eff ect, not least because Merriman’s story of the tenement block cellar in the east. In the biggest and battle of Berlin, Stalin’s blockade of the city and the most spectacular escape mission since the erection of Socialist Unity party’s consolidation of power in the the wall the year before, 29 men, women and children east, while expertly summarised, hardly explores managed to slip to the other side. uncharte d terrain. The story of Tunnel 29 – named after the number In Germany, there has in recent years been a subtle of people it allowed to escape – has been told and but noticeable shift in how the division of the country retold . A 1962 NBC documentary that controversially is culturally repre sented. Not Ostalgie (“nostalgia for helped fund the tunnellers is said to have changed the east”) or full-on revisionism, but a creeping American attitudes to the East Berliners’ plight. In feeling that the story of an inevitable triumph of Germany, there have been memoirs, more documen- good over evil on its own taries and a 2001 TV drama. But with her 10-part The Berlin Wall does not suffi ce to cover Radio 4 podcast series Tunnel 29 in 2019, the at Potsdamer Platz people’s real experiences. A new book by the historian Robert Rauh, pub lished in Germany this month, poses the uncomfor table question of whether the building of the Berlin Wall initially had more popular support among East Germany’s population than previously conceded. Exploring these moral grey zones can, and perhaps should, be narrative non fi ction’s strong suit. Merri man has burrowed her way deep into interviews, news reports and Stasi fi les to fashion an impressive real- life page-turner, but as a book on the enduring legacy of the Berlin Wall, it doesn’t quite manage to break through to the other side.

SOBOTTA\ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY GETTY VIA BILD SOBOTTA\ULLSTEIN To buy a copy for £17.40 go to guardianbookshop.com .

14 The Guardian Saturday 28 August 2021 Nonfi ction ¶

by writers such as Ocean Vuong and Madeleine { Memoir } The Malaysian Thien, and one that Aw negotiates sensitively in writer’s investigation of his his memoir’s second half, which is addressed to his maternal grandmother. He recalls growing up family roots in China explores in Kuala Lumpur, spending summer holidays with themes of belonging and trauma his extended family in the countryside and feeling like an “imposter”. Later, Aw won a scholarship to Max Liu Cambridge where the “studied nonchalance” of well-off British undergraduates was in stark contrast to his own fastidiousness. Today, he lives in London Years ago I was queueing and is the author of four novels. in a fruit and veg shop The most famous of these, the Booker prize - in Cornwall with my half- longlisted Five Star Billionaire (2013) , followed a Chinese dad when an quintet of characters in 21st-century Shanghai. It elderly woman came up fi zzed with a verbal energy and a social sweep that and asked him: “Where simultaneously captured the dizzying pace of urban are you from?” “Liverpool,” Asia and made it diffi cult for the reader to get close Strangers on a Pier: he said. “But where are you to his characters. Aw’s memoir is, by contrast, an A Portrait of a Family really from?” she persisted. intimate work in which the personal subject matter by Tash Aw, This question is com mon- and smaller canvas allow for careful contemplation. 4th Estate, £8.99 place for the children and The clarity of Aw’s writing means that, even when even grandchildren of he makes a generalisation, you sense he’s arrived immigrants but it is diffi cult to answer, in part there after considerable thought: “This is what it because, as Tash Aw, a Malaysian writer of Chinese means to be modern in Asia today: you are required descent, says in this brief but searching memoir , to detach yourself from the past and live only people rarely think of themselves as immigrants: in the present … ” “That is something others describe you as.” Aw feels At fi rst, I wondered why Aw feels resigned to being misunderstood when resigned to being Aw hadn’t written a longer “the explanation of where I’m from and who I am misunderstood book about his family. might seem too complicated” and chooses instead when ‘the The “abnormally high “to pretend to be whatever someone assumes I rate of suicide” among am ”. Writing off ers more room to explore the vexed explanation of its male members, which question of origins and, in this memoir, an oppor- where I’m from he mentions in passing, tunity for Aw to add colour to a family portrait and who I am sounds as if it warrants a that has until now been marked by “opacity” might seem too book-length investigation and “cloudiness”. complicated’ of its own. The second time Both of Aw’s grandfathers migrated from I read Strangers on a Pier, southern China to the Malay peninsula “at some however, I was surprised point in the 1920s”. The imprecision of the date is by the brevity of passages telling. China’s Qing dynasty had recently ended that had struck me fi rst time around. Aw has honed but, Aw thinks, his ancestors “did not know they his ideas to a sharpness that may have had less impact were living in momentous times” and “wanted only in a longer work. The white space that surrounds his to escape crushing poverty ”. He gently probes his text works as a visual prompt for readers’ reveries parents for information, but conversations with his about their own roots. father are stilted . His mother tells him a disturbing While travelling, Aw notices things and conveys story about a man who came to Malaysia with Aw’s in a few words the larger truths they illustrate. One grandfather and eventually drowned himself in of the most memorable examples occurs on a bus a river. Aw is shocked, but when he asks his mother in Singapore, when he spots a woman crying during to elaborate she says: “So boring, what is there a video call with a little boy. Aw speculates that she to tell?” has left her family and moved thousands of miles for Many readers of east Asian heritage will recognise work. For people from the part of the world where he the “casual vagueness” that Aw observes in his grew up, Aw refl ects, “the normality of separation” is parents. The past is to be avoided, there is always ingrained but produces pain “so deep that it can’t be some trivial matter to take precedence and societies spoken of in any way other than perfunctorily ”. His bent on progress create simplistic myths to fi ll the memoir is aff ecting because, as well as reaching a silence. But are we right to encourage our parents better understanding of his own family history, he and grandparents to confront “unexamined trauma” sees his ancestors in today’s migrants and reminds concerning events that are far from our own us that their stories are complex and remarkable, experience, even if we believe we carry its legacies wherever they are from. within us? It’s a question that has been posed in recent years To buy a copy for £7.82 go to guardianbookshop.com.

Saturday 28 August 2021 The Guardian 15 ¶ Label

more contingent, ad hoc alliances. Vera’s fi rst husband, Fiction Milosz, is long dead; so, more recently, is her Israeli husband, Tuvia. Tuvia’s son, Rafi , has had some form of intense relationship with Nina, Milosz and Vera’s daughter, and together they have produced Gili, the novel’s awkward, pained 39-year-old narrator. Nina has largely disappeared from the family’s life, and is immensely troublesome both in presence and From Tito’s gulags to a kibbutz, absence. When she returns for the party, she comes a powerful retelling of a Jewish trailing a sense of disarray and impending disaster; and that’s before she reveals that she has an incurable woman’s life, from the author illness that will attack her brain and wreak havoc on of A Horse Walks into a Bar her memory and consciousness. In what appears to be a moment of desperate whimsy, she asks her Alex Clark mother, Rafi and Gili to make a fi lm for her to watch when she no longer knows quite who she is. It’s an elaborate set up, made even more so by the Israeli author David thickness of backstory that precedes this strained Grossman’s concisely quartet’s journey to fi lm Vera’s life, culminating in a deva stating novel was trip to Goli Otok, the Croatian island on which Vera inspired by the life of Eva was imprisoned. But it also resolves to much clearer Panić Nahir, a Jewish emotional realities: a mother who has abandoned her woman from the former daughter, and a daughter who has then replicated the Yugoslavia who, having same behaviour with her own child; the types and More Than I been imprisoned and hierarchies of love that will always leave someone Love My Life tortured as a traitor in one feeling as though they are second best; the impossi- by David Grossman, of Tito’s gulags, came to bility of taking on another person’s sense of betrayal translated by Jessica Israel with her daughter, and anger and expunging it on their behalf; the Cohen, Cape, £18.99 married a widower and endless merry-go-round of handed-down trauma. created a politically and There are specifi cs at play, too. Grossman returns socially active life on a kibbutz. But that condensed repeatedly to Vera’s experiences during and immedi- biography barely scrapes the surface of a story so ately after the second world war, showing us critical emotionally, ideologically and morally complex that it moments – most notably Vera’s refusal to denounce takes all of Grossman’s considerable skills to render. her Serbian husband, leading to her arrest and separ- He is not the fi rst artist to attempt it; the Serbian ation from a young Nina – from multiple viewpoints. novelist Danilo Kiš made a television series about The series of passages in which Grossman recreates Eva, and there was a documentary in 2003. But Vera’s life on Goli Otok, where she is forced to stand Grossman, who had a “profound friendship” with her on the top of a mountainous outcrop in baking sun for more than 20 years until her death in 2015, evi dently for hour after hour in an attempt to break her will, felt that there was more to say, and has responded to take on a horrendous dreamlike quality. Eva’s wish for her and her daughter Tiana’s story to But after all that sacrifi ce and bravery, what is left? be told once more. In doing so, he has demonstrated On one side is Vera, a character beloved of the family again that the novel – elastic, expansive, amenable to she has nurtured, undaunted by loss, determined to painful fragmentation – can provide a space for the stand fi rm in the service of every principle she holds, most harrowing and resistant material. every decision she has made. On the other, though, is Grossman does it by approaching his central story the small child she left behind her, and the extraor din- crabwise; a method that will be familiar to those who ary acts of self-erasure and self-harm – through sexual have read his International Booker winner A Horse surrender, endless movement, habitual severing of Walks into a Bar , in which he tackles issues of art and bonds – that Nina has acted out over half a century. transgression through the lens of stand up comedy, or The question that the novel poses is not one of who his deeply aff ecting exploration of grief, duty and was right and who was wrong, but of how painful national identity To the End of the Land . In More Than events and actions can be accommodated without I Love My Life’s earlier a complete breakdown of familial bonds. Is Nina’s sections, Vera – his ver- future the only place where mental scars can be truly sion of Eva – is a character erased? How will Gili stop being “a hologram of the of almost comic-book mess” created by her parents? For all its determination charisma, 90 years old to stare into the abyss, this scrupulous, anguished and celebrating her birth- novel does suggest a more hopeful reso lution – albeit day with a family of num- one that might take decades to reach. erous branches, consist- David Grossman ing of blood relations and To buy a copy for £16.14 go to guardianbookshop.com . D’ALESSANDRO/GETTY STEFANIA

16 The Guardian Saturday 28 August 2021 Fiction ¶ This picaresque adventure Worldly woes come to a is a homage to 18th-century small village in a German novels that resonates with bestseller that is sprinkled our own superstitious times with matter-of-fact magic Alice Jolly James Smart

This novel is a virtuoso The okapi lives in the performance. A literary Democratic Republic of homage to Fielding and Congo, its glossy brown Sterne , it tells the story of body sloping up from Thomas Peach, who moves zebra-striped legs. It’s to a remote corner of Som- an unlikely presence in er set in 1785 to nurse his western Ger many, but that’s The Infernal Riddle ailing wife. But his wife is What You Can not why Selma is unsettled of Thomas Peach never seen, and gossip is See from Here when she sees one, calmly by Jas Treadwell, rife. Is Mr Peach “a scholar by Mariana Leky, wandering the woods of the Hodder, £16.99 of mysterious arts”, and has translated by Westerwald in her dreams. he imprisoned his wife “in Tess Lewis, She is scared because every order to get his grasping hands on an inheritance”? Bloomsbury, £8.99 time she dreams of an When Mr Peach travels to Bristol, he encounters okapi, someone dies. a young woman who is apparently possessed by a What You Can See From Here has become a phen o- demon. This meeting leads, in true 18th-century menon since its 2017 publication, selling more than style, to a sequence of picaresque adventures that 600,000 copies in Germany alone. This translation present the reader with “puzzle and conundrum on reveals a warm and curious book that – despite the every side”. But it is not the narrative that matters odd exotic visitor – has a very local focus, its eyes set here so much as the vigour and rhythm of the narra- on a small community in a nameless village, its tive voice, which belongs to a curious chorus of drama sprinkled with matter-of-fact magic. “necromantic spirits”, who are by turns digressive, At its heart is Luisa, Selma’s thoughtful grand- dis cur sive, comic and wise. T he galloping rhythm daughter. Luisa’s mother is wrapped up in her fl ower of their storytelling creates a heartbeat that sounds shop and an aff air with the ice-cream seller, and her through each page of the book. From mysterious father is obsessed with his psychoanalyst. So Luisa mentions of the profession of horse boiler to saucy relies on others, including the devoted Selma . references to games of frog-in-the-breech, the world Selma’s vision and its grim aftermath shatter the “spirits” create is rich in eccentric period detail Luisa, but life goes on. She falls for a stranger, gets and gentle humour. a job and acquires a wolfh ound. Her father leaves All this is most enjoyable, but why create an exact to travel, instructing the stay-at-homes to “let more copy of an 18th-century novel? T he reader always of the world in”. The world, of course, comes to the suspects that Peach’s “remarkable secrets” will prove village anyway: there are petty thefts and failed less interesting than expected. Sure enough, the book businesses, admissions of love and acts of sabotage. stumbles to a halt rather than resolving or explaining. Strangeness is rarely far away. Selma’s sister-in- Yet, strangely, this proves more satisfying than law Elsbeth is affl icted by gossipy imps . Even the disappointing. This may be because Treadwell has more pragmatic characters hear voices and give discov ered unlikely resonances between the 18th- credence to prophecies. There are dashes of magic century novel and our own times. Rum our, farce, realism, as well as a hearty dose of the Brothers Grimm, ridiculous happenings, amoral characters, the losing and Leky’s clear, direct prose gives the everyday battle between reason and superstition. A world in and the fantastical equal weight. The result is that which one damn thing happens after another and all mundane events acquire a patina of myth, while we can do is shrug. Does any of this sound familiar? rumours and superstitions feel like truths that have Treadwell’s book entertains and impresses but also bloomed amid the Westerwald. rambles and frustrates. Yet he must be congrat ulated Some of Leky’s cast make sense of this rich, often for an extraordinary feat of literary ventrilo quism and cruel world via aphorisms, Buddhism or psycho- also for reminding us what literary historical fi ction analysis; others are simply grumpy. It’s a mix that does best:creat e an entirely convincing historical stops the novel feeling too folksy, despite its world while also using that world as a lens through quirkiness, and makes it a clear-eyed tonic in which to view the present day. troubled times.

To buy a copy for £14.78 go to guardianbookshop.com . To buy a copy for £8.36 go to guardianbookshop.com .

Saturday 28 August 2021 The Guardian 17 Books of the month

{ Children } Island adventures, a sci-fi thriller, TS Eliot’s cat and teachers chased through the forest by monsters Imogen Russell Williams

The remote wildness of a Scottish island blended with Celtic folklore and Hindu mythology: Jasbinder Bilan’s Aarti & the Blue Gods (Chicken House) is a gem for readers of eight-plus. Aarti lives alone with her exacting, cruel aunt, cut off from the world and her own history – until a boy washes up on the beach, and she makes an extraordinary discovery. Deftly interweaving the tangible and the numinous, this richly layered adventure confi rms Bilan’s striking, original talent. From Scavengers author Darren Simpson comes The Memory Thieves (Usborne), a tense sci-fi thriller. In the Elsewhere Sanctuary, young residents, including Cyan, submit to Dr Haven’s memory (Andersen) by Sue Cheung follows the eponymous modifi cations to escape deep-rooted trauma – but heroine on a quest to discover her talent. Everyone when Cyan fi nds a cryptic message carved into a whale else has one, so surely she must too … but thwarted skeleton, and sees a new arrival resist the regime, he by distressing clumsiness, disgusting cakes and begins to rebel, too. Simpson combines fast-paced defi antly fl eeing guinea-pig assistants, will Maddy visual storytelling with a complex, thought-provoking ever discover her unique gift? A highly illustrated, message about coming to terms with the past. frequently hilarious start to a new series. A philosophical standalone, Poison for Breakfast Written by Geoff rey Faber’s granddaughter Polly, (Rock the Boat) from Daniel Handler AKA Lemony and published, naturally, by Faber, The Book Cat is Snicket, is narrated by the author, who realises one illustrated with bright-eyed charm by Clara Vulliamy. morning that he is investigating his own murder. Or is It’s the fanciful account of Morgan, wartime street he? This little book feels like opening a win dow to let kitten turned purrfect publishing house cat under the in air and light. It’s fi lled with curious infor m ation and auspices of TS Eliot. Morgan then trains other kittens powerful feelings, and is humorous, sad, meditative as writers’ companions to get them out of London – a and rapturous by turns . sweet feline twist on the classic evacuee story. For seven-plus, Maddy Yip’s Guide to Life A picture book for fi ve-plus, the gorgeous My

Clockwise from below: 10 Silly Children; The Book Cat; My Beautiful Voice; and Ten Delicious Teachers { Teenagers } Time travel and tragedy in south London, a daring race to the top of a tree and an unlikely friendship

Nottingham succeeds on his second attempt. Angry and unsettled, Sully challenges Notting- ham to a race – to be the fi rst to climb the impos- sible tree, the tree with- The Upper World out a name. But will one by Femi Fadugba, of them make it to the Penguin, £7.99 top without tragedy? When teenage Esso Spare, brief, limpidly somehow starts seeing clear, this novella from glimpses of the future, a multi-award-winning he is haunted by a vision author distils the thin- of a bullet fi red in an skinned, painful sensi- alley; but can the future tivity of teenage boys, possibly be changed? desperate both to Fifteen years on, Rhia stand out and fi t in. is fi lled with questions about her parents and the moment that ensured she never met them. Beautiful Voice (Frances Lincoln) by Joseph Coelho, Does Dr Esso have ans- illustrated by Allison Colpoys, is a story that unfurls wers for her – or is his as delicately as a fl ower, infused with Colpoys’s glow- talk about time travel just ing swirls of colour. The shy narrator doesn’t speak in disturbed rambling? class – until her teacher Miss Flotsam provides the From the streets of south The Sound perfect conditions for her to write a poem, and then London to the unearthly of Everything to recite it, in her newly discovered voice. strangeness of the Upper by Rebecca Henry, In picture books for younger readers, two very World, this is a superbly Everything With funny counting books stand out. In 10 Silly Children original debut. Written Words, £8.99 . (Pavilion), new talent Jon Lander takes us joyously with ambition and pan- Complex, challenging from sensible activities – sitting still, having a bath, ache, it eff ortlessly blends Kadie has been bounced cooking, gardening – to fold-out fl aps in which theoretical physics with from foster home to extreme silliness holds sway: think dressed-up lions all-too-human tragedy. foster home, betrayal and feasts of worm pie. It’s all conveyed in playful, to betrayal. But though free-feeling hand-drawn sweeps of colour, while the noise of the every- solemn injunctions not to open said fl aps give the day often threatens to book a conspiratorial feel, perfect for reading aloud. overwhelm her, she And Ten Delicious Teachers (Walker), by Ross has a talent for music – Montgomery and Sarah Warburton, features a hand- one that prompts her to ful of heedless educators who have missed the last forge an unlikely alliance bus home and take a shortcut through the forest – to with Dayan, also a gifted the delight of the hungry, brightly coloured monsters The Climbers musician. As envious who pick them off , one by one. Funny and irreverent, by Keith Gray, girls begin a campaign of it’s easy to imagine this one being a huge hit. Barrington Stoke, £7.99 online hate against her, Also from Walker, Ergo, by Alexis Deacon and Sully is the best tree can Kadie bring herself Viviane Schwarz, is the deceptively simple story of climber in the village, to trust Dayan and let a little yellow chick discovering that she is not the until the boy who calls him in? A brilliantly world, and neither is her eggshell. Ergo’s progress himself “Nottingham” assured fi rst novel, evok- from certainty to doubt, exploration to new discov ery, appears. No one climbs ing all the stored-up, is comic, engaging and profoundly thought- Twisted Sister without defensive hurt of the provoking, for readers of any age. at least seven falls, but rejected child. IRW

Saturday 28 August 2021 The Guardian 19 ¶ Interview

racial privilege attached to it have played in universal- ‘ A lot of white ising white feminist concerns, agendas and beliefs as being those of all of feminism and of all of feminists.” female professors In the book, Zakaria outlines how a one-size-fi ts-all white feminism has been complicit in interven tionist told me to quit’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in destroying native aid and empowerment structures in low income countries, and in denying the cultural backwardness of western Activist and author societies vis-a-vis women’s rights. Her “trauma” is central to her motivations for Rafi a Zakaria tells writing the book. In 2002, when she ran away from her husband with “a baby on her hip”, she had no Nesrine Malik that there money, bank account or credit card. She managed to leave sheltered accommodation only when a black is no one-size-fi ts-all woman off ered her an apartment. It was the fi rst time she could “exhale”, she says. “I had been running for feminism and that the so long.” After a few diffi cult years, she managed to fi nish law school and complete a post graduate degree in political philosophy. At one point, a stranger paid for goal of her work is to her groceries at the super market when her daughter brought an unbudgeted bag of popsicles to the till. comfort women of colour “That moment of not having enough money to pay for your food is really seared into my memory. I felt so who have been ‘gaslit’ much shame, so much absolute disappointment in myself because I had to take charity to feed myself afi a Zakaria’s new book Against and my kid.” Graduate school, with its subsidised White Feminism starts with a sort childcare and fl exible hours, was a refuge, a place of Sex and the City scene entitled where Zakaria could be “poor and smart”. “At a wine bar, a group of feminists The white women she met on the way, all of osten- ...” In it, some well-heeled white sibly impeccable liberal and feminist credentials, did R women are gathered for a drink in little to help her. In law school “a lot of white female New York. The only brown woman professors told me to quit”. When she felt she had in attendance, Zakaria winces and wilts under fi nally found her place in the NGO world, white the glare of their innocent questions, as she tries women “obstructed” and sabotaged her “in every to avoid the responses she tends to receive when possible way” from doing her job. “Every time I she tells her true story – ones of pity, discomfort would write a report there would be 10 people who and avoidance. would shred it, telling me how I was wrong and I was Zakaria was born in Pakistan and at the age of 17 failing and I didn’t know this and I didn’t know that. agreed to an arranged marriage to a Pakistani man Basically it was a trap, I was set up to fail. So then living in the US. “I had never experienced freedom, you can tell the story that we gave so and so the job so I gladly signed it away,” she writes. The marriage and we’re so inclusive, but she decided she didn’t was unhappy, and she left her abusive husband at the want to do it.” Zakaria is softly spoken and quasi- age of 25, seeking refuge in a shelter with her toddler. academic in her speech, but her tone sharpens when What followed were years of precarity in the US. she lists these slights and humiliations, as it does She tells me, from her home in Indiana, that she when she recounts other incidents that made her wrote the book because “I am a Muslim brown person feel like a sort of shop window display of a brown from Pakistan, and the assumption when I meet woman for the benefi t of a white audience. “I was people in the west is that all the oppression I’ve ever either never allowed to faced, all the hardship that I’ve ever faced, were back ‘I don’t think speak or entrapped.” in Pakistan, and were the consequence of cultural white women are One of the problems with mores and beliefs.” With Against White Feminism, truly aware how white feminism according she wanted to challenge that “liberation trajectory” uncomfortable to Zakaria is that it is still of the Muslim woman’s story, so that women who connected to the patriarchy live in the west stop thinking “Oh it’s so bad over other women through the power pool of there –” it must be “so great here”. feel, how much white men. “That shared By writing the book, Zakaria hopes to de centre they have to edit culture can be drawn on and white feminism or, at least, call attention to the fact themselves, how augmented by ideas such that it is a template that does not work for everyone fed up they are’ as ‘lean in’ [Facebook CEO because it is limited in its utility by white supremacy. Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 “A white feminist,” Zakaria writes, “is someone who bestselling book advocated

AJ MASTTHE GUARDIAN MASTTHE AJ refuses to consider the role that whiteness and the a can-do brand of feminist

20 The Guardian Saturday 28 August 2021 Interview ¶

Rafi a Zakaria ‘I feel a very strong sense of responsibility towards other women like me, who’ve been through traumatic marriages, migration, being a single mother’ self-empowerment] that undergird the white Imran Khan , the prime minister, was challenged feminists you might encounter at Google.” This model by Judy Woodruff of PBS earlier this year about of feminism has “gotten far and shattered ceilings, I comments he made that appeared to blame women won’t lie”, she says. But once white feminists succeed, for incidents of rape in Pakistan, Zakaria saw the they hoard the spoils. “If white men have welcomed episode as a manifestation of “a legacy of cultural you to the executive suite , the way you protect your ranking that no one has really bothered to take apart. position there is you continue to please white men.” That cultural ranking says that cultural crimes occur What about the women of colour who get to the top, in these places and those sorts of cultural crimes remain silent and so are also complicit? “There are a don’t exist in other places in the west. There isn’t lot of benefi ts in being the token woman of colour. some particular British form of violence against There are doors that open for you, things available to women, it’s just violence against women.” you that are not available to a trouble-making brown With her book, Zakaria hopes to console the feminist like m e, because I am going to ask questions scolded and scold the consolers. “I don’t think white and I’m not going to take it.” But she sees these women women are truly aware of how uncomfortable other as co-opted by necessity, rather than by conscious women feel, how much they have to edit themselves, agree ment and shared interest. “I have sympathy for how fed up they are.” While she harbours some hope them; for literally hundreds of years that has been the that white feminists will listen to her advice on how only way to get anywhere close to power.” to cede space and examine their prejudices, she says The sharpest of Zakaria’s criticism of white femi- the real goal of her work is to comfort women of nism is reserved for white female journalists. “There’s colour who have been “gaslit”. a certain arc that the editors want,” she says, that “I struggled very much. I had come from trauma, these journalists deliver. “In the case of Afghanistan, I went into trauma. I feel a very strong sense of there was very much an idea that this was America responsibility towards other women like me, who’ve taking feminism to Afghan women,” and “liberating been through traumatic marriages, migration, being them from the Taliban. There are colonial precedents a single mother. Women like me never really make it. to sending female reporters out there. These white The odds are so stacked against someone with my women are sent in as emblems – our women are brave experience, my racial background, my economic and they are out taking pictures and writing stories background, to be in the conversation at all. And so and getting your story out to the world. But the since I’ve somehow slipped into the conversation I assumption is that there isn’t anyone in Afghanistan feel a responsibility towards other women who are who can write in English and tell the stories of just as smart as me, just as articulate. Now I’m here, Afghanistan to the world. ” I’m going to say all those things. I believe that you can When it comes to her native Pakistan, a country tear things down when they’re not working, and from which white feminists believe she was saved, build them up again. That is one of my core beliefs, Zakaria has little time for their concerns. When because I’ve done it” •

Saturday 28 August 2021 The Guardian 21 ¶ Books essay

hen the clock struck for Up close lockdown last March, many of us found ourselves and dangerous con demned to live alongside people in more intense W proximity than we’d bargained for. Flatmates, spouses, children were no longer occasional For decades he was companions but a constant presence . For me, this has been the case with DH Lawrence. wildly out of fashion, Having committed to writing a book on him, suddenly I found myself sequestered with him. There now DH Lawrence was a time when this would have felt sexually charged. In my 20s, I fell for his vision of bodily life, as so is everywhere – from many of his female readers ha d done. “His intuitive intel ligence sought the core of woman,” Anaïs Nin novels and biographies wrote after his death. Visiting the shrine at Lawrence’s former ranch in New Mexico in 1939, WH Auden mocked the “cars of women pilgrims” traipsing “to to a new adaptation stand rever ently there and wonder what it would have been like to sleep with him”. of Lady Chatterley’s But for me, this phase has long passed. Since then, I’ve read the women – Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett Lover. Lara Feigel – who have found him more dangerous. I’ve read the essays where Lawrence condemns “cocksure women”, explores his allure celebrates the phallus, propounds ideas of racial hierarchy, rails against democracy and urges us to hit our children. Returning to these has felt claustro- phobic during the months of our proximity, perhaps especially because intense closeness is a feature of Lawrence’s writing. He invites it from readers – his prose claims almost excessive personal investment. And his characters are often Louise Delamere too close, engrossed in each and Rafe Spall other or captivated by an in the 2006 fi lm idea of themselves they have The Chatterley Aff air got from another person and can’t escape from. Emerging from lockdown, I found it peculiar to discover that three other women had also been locked away with him. Rachel Cusk’s Booker-longlisted novel, Second Place, takes as inspiration Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir about Lawrence’s time in New Mexico. Dodge – a New York socialite before she settled there with a Native American husband – invited Lawrence to stay, hoping he’d describe the area in his work. Her memoir records all that she and Lawrence put each other through. Lawrence put considerable eff ort into Dodge’s moral and sartorial improvement (persuading her to dress like his mother). But he vilifi ed her in life and fi ction as a wilful woman. In Cusk’s novel, a painter called L is summoned to stay with a female writer called M in a house in the Norfolk marshes. They remain frustratingly distant, yet are sometimes fl ooded by closeness so frightening that it nearly costs the narrator her marriage to Tony (the name of Dodge’s husband). Why does Cusk need Lawrence for this, given it’s an idea she’s had before? She has read him for years , but I think she needed this moment of reckoning with

BBC; PICTORIAL PRESS LTDALAMY LTDALAMY PRESS PICTORIAL BBC; a revered male genius for the next stage in her

22 The Guardian Saturday 28 August 2021 Books essay ¶ autobiographical project. Cusk’s narrator isn’t only reader does. This is surely Dodge, though. M has characteristics of Lawrence the the case during his famously writer, sharing his androgyny, his sense of the self as repul sive speech about his inhabited more fully when stripped of personality. ex-wife’s clitoris – which he Reading Lawrence during lockdown – at a time describes as a hard beak when, as a woman living alone with children, all my tearing at him with “a raving resources of will have been required – I resented his sort of self-will”’. When sug gestion that female wilfulness is dangerous. I was Mellors says this to Connie, grateful, reading the memoirs of women who knew I think Lawrence gives us him, when they resist him. “Your puppets do not To spend sustained room to see his speech as a always dance to your pipe,” the poet HD told him in time with Lawrence partial view of a failed mar- her autofi ction Bid Me to Live. And now, weeping, is to argue with him riage. Connie doesn’t agree Cusk’s narrator tries to get L to understand “that this with Mellors – she pushes will of mine that he so objected to had survived num- him to refl ect on his own part in the diffi culties. It erous attempts to break it, and at this point could be becomes the kind of scene Lawrence does so well, credited with my own survival and that of my child”. portraying minute-by-minute gyrations of love and To spend sustained time with Lawrence is to argue hate. They bicker; he tells her that women are self- with him. He argued with everyone, and most of all important and she tells him that he is. She has arranged with himself. Part of why he still matters is his love of to stay the night – it will be their fi rst whole night ambivalence and oppositions – there was no thought together – but he tells her to go home. They make up, that wasn’t enlivened for him by considering its and go quietly to bed; it’s not till the morning that they opposite – and this can bring out equivalent energies undress and, in a glow of spring sunlight, she examines in his readers. It’s satisfying to fi nd Cusk arguing with his body openly for the fi rst time and they have sex. him, and to encounter Frances Wilson doing so in her After wrangling with Millett, it has come as a relief bio graphy of Lawrence, Burning Man, published to read Alison MacLeod’s forthcoming Tenderness earlier this year. and to fi nd in it a large-hearted celebration of Lady Wilson insists here that his novels weren’t his Chatterley’s Lover. MacLeod’s novel fi ctionalises two greatest works. Women in Love was not, she says, the main time periods: the moment in Lawrence’s own “fl awless masterpiece that Lawrence believed he had life when he had a love aff air with Rosalind Baynes, written”. I disagree with her larger judgments, but and the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 she constructs a thrilling romp of an argument that (preceded by a hearing in New York). MacLeod enables her to defend him as well, making a case for moves, with dexterity and ease, between the heads his essays as great works of art. of Lawrence and various defenders of the novel. I too have done my share of defending Lawrence, These range from Jackie Kennedy (an enthusiast as well as arguing with him. I have defended him, in of the novel, whom MacLeod imagines secretly particular, from Millett – another woman who’s been attending the US hearing), to an FBI agent who falls pushed into extremes of judgment by Lawrence’s for the book he has been charged with helping to ban. excesses. Millett’s book Sexual Politics was in some “The book must be read,” MacLeod quotes ways a necessary corrective to the cult of Lawrence, Lawrence writing. “It’s a bomb, but to the living, a led by the Cambridge don FR Leavis, who cham pioned fl ood of urge – and I must sell it.” MacLeod shows the his writing in his 1955 book as “an immense body of fl ood of urge seeping through the lives of its readers, so living creation” with redemptive power for humanity. that Kennedy, reading those lines about how “a woman I have decided that Millett was spectacularly wrong has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it”, about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, because she doesn’t wonders how her own existence can contain more life. read it as a novel. For the last few years, when I have The rethinking of Lawrence led by Millett was taught Lawrence, my female students have fallen in necessary to help us get away from Lawrence as the love with Lady Chatterley’s Lover and then I have given prophet celebrated by Leavis and to rescue him from them Millett to read and they have changed their the prejudices he failed imaginatively to transform. minds, condemning him for reducing women to pass- Now, we are free again to confront him as we wish. ive sexual objects. Yet Millett doesn’t take into account And it turns out that Lawrence can still off er vital sus- how fully he inhabits Connie as well as Mellors. This tenance and provocation to his female readers, and is one of the great portrayals by a man of a female can still produce in us rather drastic and exuberant character, up there with Emma Bovary and Anna fruits. We may have moved on in our sense of sexuality Kare n ina. If, as Millett suggests, the male body is more and gender, but he still speaks to so many of our desires lyrically portrayed than the female, isn’t this because – for many-sided complexity, for trenchant argument we see it through Connie’s eyes – because the female that remains open to contradiction, for books and gaze is allowed to be as objectifying as the male gaze? lives driven by mood rather than plot, for sel ood For Millett, the gamekeeper is Lawrence. But in freed of personality, for the awakened female gaze • the novel, Mellors’ is just one, fl awed point of view. There are times, I think, when Lawrence found him Lara Feigel’s Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris as overreaching, as foolish, as the modern female Lessing is published by Bloomsbury.

Saturday 28 August 2021 The Guardian 23 ¶ Inside story

ago. This means, for Sverker, that they could almost Passing the ‘chimp test’ certainly talk. “If two people have kids together,” he points out, “I very much doubt that one was without Steven Poole language and the other one with.” In his book he off ers a rousing defence of the Nean- derthals against decades of prejudice: “Even today the word ‘Neanderthal’ is used as a pejorative term for people with the kind of primitive attitudes we do not How did humans learn feel are appropriate for a Homo sapiens,” he writes. “It is both bigoted and sad that another kind of human to talk and why haven’t should be devalued in this way simply because they were diff erent [...] The Neanderthals were Europe’s chimpanzees followed original inhabitants, the only true Europeans. We and the Neanderthals went our separate ways about half a suit? Linguistics expert million years ago. It was in Europe that they evolved from earlier forms of humans, whereas we Homo Sverker Johansson sapiens are relatively recent immigrants from Africa.” A determination to redress unthinking prejudice is also behind the curious fact that Johansson is, on one looks at the facts and possible estimation, the world’s most prolifi c author . In parallel to his studies in the origins of language, he busts some long-held also maintains a web-crawling bot (LSJbot) that scrapes geographical, meterological and other data chauvinist myths and automatically creates short Wikipedia articles. “Wikipedia has excellent geographic coverage where ow and when did human language young white males live,” he explains drily. “North evolve? Did a “grammar module” America, Europe, generally industriali sed countries – just pop into our ancestors’ brains but Africa was basically a blank spot . Suppose there is one day thanks to a random change a disaster in some village somewhere. What do you do in our DNA? Or did language come as a journalist? You look the village up on Wikipedia, Hfrom grooming , or tool use , or and if you have a stub [a short article] there, you can cooking meat with fi re? These and at least see which province it is in, the rough location, other hypotheses exist, but there seems little way to the nearest city.” He estimates that, to date, nearly 20% rationally choose between them. It was all so very long of the articles on Wikipedia, or more than 1.5m, were ago, so any theory must be essentially speculation. fi rst created by his bot. Take that, Georges Simenon . Or must it? This is the question presented as an There was also, it turns out, a gender imbalance in elegant intellectual thriller by The Dawn of Language: theories of how humans came to speak. Sverker’s Axes, Lies, Midwifery and How We Came to Talk. Its general approach in his book is laudably empirical author is Sverker Johansson, a serene and amiable 60- – “I was trained in the hard sciences and the habits year-old Swede who speaks to me over Zoom from his of thinking carry over,” he says. Which means casting book-crammed home study in the city of Falun, where aside any existing theory that simply doesn’t accord he works as a senior adviser at Dalarna University. with known facts. And one known fact is that women Johansson actually began his academic life as a are just as good a s men a t using language. One particle physicist, but, he now explains: “I felt a common hypothesis, that language evolved through growing frustration with that fi eld, because it was sexual selection – men competing for the attention of becoming more and more industrialised. I felt like the women – can therefore be dismissed. “Women and guy on the Ford assembly line, screwing screw men talk equally well,” Johansson says. “They have number 37 over and over and over again. That’s not the same language capacity. Unlike songbir ds, for what I want to do as a researcher.” He smiles. His fi rst example . And that means that an explanation for detour was into neutrino astronomy , and then he language has to be gender-neutral or near enough.” became fascinated by linguistics, and the puzzle of The intellectual fi eld has been notable for its how language exists at all. preponderance of confi dent men with allegedly all- He began attending yearly conferences devoted to encompassing theories, and Sverker made a point of the question, and wrote an academic book, Origins of striking a blow against unthinking sexism. “The posi- Language: Constraints on Hypotheses (2005). His new tion is evidence-driven,” he notes mildly, “but I made book, however, is not merely a populari sation of that a choice to deliberately make it prominent. As, I would one. For one thing, he says, he has changed his mind say, counter-fi re against all the male-chauvinist theo- about the Neanderthals . Scientists have since ries that have been published over the last century.” sequenced the entire Neanderthal genome, and we This approach sees Johansson, like Sherlock now know that Neanderthals interbred with modern Holmes, eliminating hypotheses one by one. Noam

GILLES BARBIERIMAGEBROKERREXSHUTTERSTOCK; JONAS TETZLAFF JONAS BARBIERIMAGEBROKERREXSHUTTERSTOCK; GILLES humans before dying out only about 30,000 years Chomsky ’s theory that a brain “grammar” module

24 The Guardian Saturday 28 August 2021 Inside story ¶

cooperation was an advantage turn out to be unique to Homo erectus, and explain why no other animal possesses language.” That is, our ancestors had already begun to talk around a million years ago. There is much more in the book, including enjoyable sparks of sardonic humour – “In the absence of detailed knowledge about the way mirror neurons work,” he writes, “there is a comprehensive literature that consists in speculation as to what they are for”; or, when discussing animal communication: “When it comes to most of their signals only the squids know what they mean.” It is in many ways a model of popular-science writing in its imperturbable, reason- able weighing of competing ideas. “I hope the reader might see a way of thinking and a way of treating evidence that might be new to many of them,” Johansson agrees. He’s already at work on a follow-up book to be called The Footprints of Language. “That’s about what hap- pens next, right after we have language. How do we get this enormous diversity of languages that we have in the world today, of 7,000 languages and hundreds of diff erent language families? But it’s not simply chaos: there’s a lot of pattern in these languages.” Why should we care about suddenly appeared by virtue of a single large genetic all this? “Well, there are two mutation, for example, is also discarded because such types of answer,” he says a “supermutation” is not “biologically plausible”. benignly. “One is basically Robin Dunbar’s thesis that language evolved out of plain curiosity – where do grooming habits in larger social groups, meanwhile, we come from? The same fails to account for “why baboons, whose troops may kind of drive behind creation contain a couple of hundred individuals, have not myths, right? And the other evolved an alternative to grooming”. is more practical. Do we But group size and social interaction are key in a have any use for know ledge diff erent way, according to what Johansson fi nally about language evolution? reveals as his preferred thesis. This is partly inspired Chimps have quite And there, I would say, by the work of American anthropologist Sarah Blaff er sophisticated politics it helps us better under- Hrdy, who argues that cooperative childcare played an without needing stand language itself: the important role in evolution. Johansson agrees, and language, says mechanisms of language . thinks that the cooperation necessary was the spark Johansson And that would be helpful for the evolution of language in turn. “Because human in thinking about language children are so diffi cult to deliver,” he writes in the disorders and how to support and repair them.” book, “having help can mean the diff erence between In the meantime The Dawn of Language is a fas cin a- life and death.” Midwives and grandmothers turn ting story in its own right, and surprisingly optimistic out to be key. about human nature, in its emphasis on the necessity Any such theory must pass what Johansson calls the of trust and cooperation for language to have ever got “chimp test”: it must explain why chimpanzees, so off the ground. “If you look at our relatives,” Johansson genetically close to us, did not also evolve language. says, “it becomes rather obvious. We’re not perfect. The idea that it evolved through status-seeking does People certainly fi ght a lot, but it’s like I wrote in the not pass the test, because chimps already have quite book – put 300 people in an airplane and they will sit sophisticated politics without needing language. But quietly enough across the Atlantic. Put 300 chimps in this woman-centric theory does pass, because female the same place. What will happen? chimps leave their birth troupe when sexually mature, “We are not perfect,” he repeats. “But we are more and can easily give birth with no help. So special cooperative: we have an easier time cooperating in bonds of trust and cooperation are not necessary. large groups, and with people we don’t know. We A cluster of such considerations – also taking into understand reciprocity better: we can do it at larger account evidence of tool use, culture, and other things scales. And we are better at suppressing aggression. – leads Johansson to conclude, in a disarmingly thrill- Even if you feel you want to strangle the guy across ing reveal: “The combination of trust and helpfulness, the aisle because he’s incessantly talking, you just the right family and group structure, a language- don’t.” Instead, perhaps, just marvel at the fact ready mind and an ecological niche in which he can talk at all •

Saturday 28 August 2021 The Guardian 25 ¶ How I wrote The Song of Achilles

As I typed, I felt giddy places I’d found welcome ‘It helped people come but illicit. I feared that when I couldn’t fi nd it out to their parents’ my classics peers and elsewhere. I wanted this professors would hate book to be that kind of Madeline Miller the idea. There is a long story: one with open history of gatekeeping arms, with room for in classics. Attempts everyone who might It was the early months him. I had no theatr ical to expand the lens of want to come in. of 2000. I was about experience, but he scholarship have some- In the decade since it to graduate with my said he was directing times been met with was published I’ve been classics degree and Troilus and Cressida, open hostility, and honoured to hear from begin a master’s. I was Shakespeare’s version women and scholars of readers who put excerpts already working on of the Iliad. Achilles and colour have been under- in their wedding vows, my thesis, on a topic Patroclus were both in it. mined and belittled. A who made quotes into that had long frustrated Directing Troilus and young woman taking the tattoos, who taught it me: the way that some Cressida was a revelation. revered and traditionally in their classes. (My scholarship dismissed I realised that the things male epic material of the fears about a classical the relationship between I wanted to say about Iliad and centring it as a backlash never came Achilles and Patroclus, Achilles and Patroclus gay love story might not to pass; the classics labelling them “good weren’t a master’s thesis thrill people. community has been friends”. I’d read Plato’s after all. They were a But still I kept writing. wonderfully supportive.) Symposium , where novel. Along with being For so many years, books I’ve heard from people Achilles and Patroclus a classicist, I had also had been homes for me, who said it helped them are not just presented dreamed of being a come out to their parents, as lovers, but the ideal writer. Books and poetry and others who said it romantic relationship. were a lifelong haven for inspired them to get I knew that interpreting me, and I had been writ- their PhDs, or to start their relationship as ing since I was a child. their own novels. Every romantic was a very old I even wrote a contem- writer wants their book idea, and I was angry at porary novel while in to have its own life, but the way homophobia college, but everything I never in my wildest was erasing this reading. came out anaemic, dreams imagined During this time, a spiritless. Until, that is, that my Achilles and good friend called me. I realised I could write Patroclus would get to He was involved with a about the thing I was have such a rich and Shakespeare theatre most passionate about: rewarding one. group. He planned to Patroclus’s story. direct that year, and he That summer, I began The Song of Achilles is wanted me to direct with to write with his voice. published by Bloomsbury .

Tom Gauld

26 The Guardian Saturday 28 August 2021