£3.50 Oxtheonian Review of books

Revisiting Martin Amis Scarlett Baron

Pierre Trudeau’s Catholic Conscience John-Paul McCarthy

Royal Politics in Thailand Nicholas Farrelly

High Style with Gore Vidal Andrew Hay

spring 2007 volume 6 . issue 2 2 the Oxonian Review of Books spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 in this issue: From the Editor:

Features Between Fundamentalisms Love Among the Ruins It’s perhaps a sign of the times that to be heard dynamic liberal democracy: it revitalises our debates and, Jacob Foster page 6 in the public arena, you have to yell with a militant as much as it reveals differences, refocuses our attention shrill. It’s tempting to blame it all on public culture on the values we share. But while polemics have their Pierre Trudeau’s Catholic Conscience being increasingly beholden to tabloid standards. place, they shouldn’t drown out everything else in the John-Paul McCarthy page 8 With headlines and sound bites now the currency of public sphere. The right kind of public debate is guided debate, one needs to get the ‘message’ or ‘spin’ right, by an ethos of civility and mutual respect. It shouldn’t and reduce things to the lowest common denominator. be about shouting down at others, or taking gratuitous Royal Shadows in the Land of Smiles To be sure, we can rely on the custodians of the Daily pleasure in painting one’s opponents as deluded. If Nicholas Farrelly page 10 Mail and the Sun to deliver on such doses—which is the polarisation between secular humanists and their to say nothing of politicians—but not usually from opponents is any indication, this is unfortunately the our Oxford dons. However, there are exceptions. situation that prevails. Much like the schism between ‘blue’ and ‘red’ states in the United States, Britain has As Britain’s atheist-in-chief, Richard Dawkins (Oxford’s become a divided country, of believers and non-believers. Reviews Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding Same Again from Martin Amis of Science) has been a strident, if not abrasive, voice It is timely, then, that this month the Canadian Scarlett Baron page 3 of secularism. His most recent book, The God Delusion, philosopher Charles Taylor (a former Chichele which quickly reached the bestsellers’ shelves and won Professor in Social and Political Theory at All Souls At the Helm with Gore Vidal him a British Book Award for Author of the Year, is College) will be presented with the 2007 Templeton Andrew Hay page 4 representative. In it he speaks of ‘a mind hijacked by Prize. The world’s largest annual monetary award religion,’ of a belief in God as ‘pernicious.’ For Professor given to an individual for intellectual merit, the Making Up Real Things Dawkins, whose work is no doubt familiar to readers Templeton Prize recognises ‘progress toward research Alexandra Harris page 5 of the Oxonian Review, it’s secular reason or bust. or discoveries about spiritual realities.’ Professor Taylor is an inspired choice. A scholar renowned for his work So Much For the Past Professor Dawkins isn’t alone in his refusal to on modernity, identity and culture, he is not one to Tom Walker page 13 countenance religion. In God Is Not Great: The Case side with fundamentalisms—of either the secular Against Religion (to be released this month), Christopher or religious kind. As he explains in his best-known Putting America Back Together Hitchens puts forward the secularist case with typically work, Sources of the Self (1989), we acquire our moral Sam O’Leary page 14 trenchant fashion: ‘As I write these words and as you languages through dialogue. We become full human read them, people of faith are in their different ways agents not in isolation but by engaging in conversation Christopher Hitchens: Citizen-Critic planning your and my destruction, and the destruction with those around us. Sometimes our moral selves Aaron MacLean page 15 of all the hard-won human attainments that I have will be defined in opposition to others. But a dialogue touched upon. Religion poisons everything.’ For also leaves itself open to a ‘fusion of horizons,’ an The Contest Over Sovereignty atheists like Professor Dawkins and Mr Hitchens, expansion of our ethical world through an appreciation Robbie Shilliam page 18 morality needn’t be grounded in religious belief. A of others’ perspectives. As Taylor argues, this requires different faith will suffice—a faith, that is, in the us to admit, in all our humility, that we will always Making AIDS History Enlightenment ideal of reason and secular politics. be some distance away from reaching that ultimate Rebecca Hodes page 19 horizon for understanding the nature of the world Yet it’s clear secular humanists of a militant stripe are and from which we go about securing the good life. themselves guilty of the kind of blind dogma they’re so happy to denounce. Liberals may be inclined to give A value of dialogue stands in need of affirmation contemporary secular humanism the benefit of the at a time when public debate is characterised by Arts and Culture doubt. In a pluralistic society, insisting on religious truth indiscriminate abuse and crass conflict. However, or divine revelation as the standards guiding our public before any dialogue can begin, there must be a Warner Herzog’s Wilderness life is a recipe for social disharmony. Whose religion willingness to listen. The task for those like Professor Alex Nemser page 12 are we to endorse? Whose truths are we to obey? If Taylor who value a public conversation—as opposed there is a modern liberal achievement, surely it is the to a public brawl—is a difficult one, for it remains The Oscars 2007: Crass Globalism toleration of different values and different ways of life. unclear whether enough people—both secular Kristin Anderson page 14 But it doesn’t stand to reason that liberals should fight liberals and religious believers—are ready even to intolerance with another form of intolerance—namely, recognise that their opponents might have a legitimate High Art Lite in the Darkest Hour an intolerance of any worldview that doesn’t accord voice to be heard. This is the price we risk paying Emily Spears-Meers page 15 science and logic with supreme value. Civilisation would for speaking in the language of fundamentalisms. be much impoverished, and would lose authenticity, were we to subject everything in our realm to the strictures of reason understood as absolute truth. Tim Soutphommasane All of which is to say that British political culture is Editor-in-Chief showing some fault-lines that should be cause for Balliol College, Oxford concern. Granted, controversy is the battery for any May 2007

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Cover Photo: Seth Lazar, © 2007 spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 the Oxonian Review of Books 3

the Same Again from Martin Amis Oxonian Review of books Scarlett Baron http://www.oxonianreview.org Martin Amis Love has transformed him. Behind the barbed wires of House of Meetings the camp, he alone among the prisoners refuses to resort Jonathan Cape, 2006 to violence, suffering the worst hardships to protect his 208 pages love. To his uncomprehending brother, Lev explains his ISBN: 0224076094 status as a non-combatant: ‘That’s for her. That’s for us.’ Editor-in-Chief Tim Soutphommasane artin Amis has always enjoyed playing with By 1956, conditions at the camp have improved M slightly. Conjugal visits are allowed. Wives travel across names. In Money (1984), widely considered to be his Senior Editor best novel, characters go by such names as Self, the country to spend a single night with their husbands Sarah Roger God, Fucker, and Shakespeare. Night Train (1997) on the ‘northern Eurasian plain, with its extreme is narrated by an overweight American female cop temperatures.’ Reunions take place in a rudimentary called Mike. In Yellow Dog (2003) the protagonist, little chalet—the ‘house of meetings.’ Zoya comes to Executive Editor meet Lev, but what happens between them on 31 July Xan Meo, is married to a woman called Russia. This Nanor Kebranian enables Amis to deploy pun after political pun. (When 1956 (‘the night of crunch and crux’) is only divulged Xan rapes his wife, for instance, ‘he invaded Russia’.) at the very end of the novel. What we do know is that the meeting leaves Lev unaccountably destroyed. Russia has been much on Amis’s mind over the last Editors few years. In 2002, he published Koba The Dread, a Kristin Anderson documentary non-fiction work that describes the Lauren Arrington atrocities committed in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s Nicholas Farrelly rule. Amis’s latest novel, House of Meetings, features a Frances Flanagan character nicknamed The Americas (other characters Joanna Langille answer to Venus, Phoenix, Uglik, and Arbachuk), but Peiling Li its main concern, again, is Russia. The book is about Lydia Newell the country’s relentlessly murderous twentieth-century: Michel Paradis its wars, its camps, its pogroms, its terrorism, and its Matthew Pennycook corruption. It is also about America and the clash of East and West—and their irreconcilable ideologies. Acknowledgements & Thanks The narrative takes the form of an email. An 86-year-old Russian man prepares to send his memoirs to Venus, his Mr Justin Dowley twenty-four-year-old American stepdaughter. His last Mrs Emma Dowley lines are written from a hospital bed in Russia, where he Ms Frances Cairncross, Rector of Exeter College Mr Alastair James, Balliol College has arranged to receive a lethal injection. Like many of Jesus College Amis’s previous novels, House of Meetings is a protracted The novel does not end with the release of the Dr Shahpur Patell suicide note, in this case a last-minute attempt to make Dr Seamus Perry, Balliol College sense of a life shattered by war and the systematic prisoners later that same year; it continues to follow the violence of a Soviet labour camp. Before the final two brothers’ lives for decades more. Amis meshes the moment comes (‘Any moment now I will click SEND’), narrator’s recollections of the past with a diary report Amis’s nameless narrator has a lifetime of crimes to of his return to the camp’s locale in September 2004. Friends of This ‘Gulag cruise’ (1 to 6 September 2004) enables confess: ‘When at first I assembled the facts before me, The Oxonian Review of Books black words on a white page, I found myself staring Amis to include a reference to another of the bleakest at a shapeless little heap of degradation and horror.’ episodes in Russia’s history—the siege of Beslan Prof. Martin McLaughlin Middle School Number One by Chechen separatists. Dr. Graham Nelson Born in 1919 to a Cossack father (‘duly deCossackised The depiction of the carnage is as close as Amis gets English Faculty Library in 1920’), the narrator fought on the German front to hitting raw emotional nerves in this book. Whereas Lady Margaret Hall Library during the Second World War. He freely admits that the scenes set in the brothers’ Soviet camp in the 1940s Magdalen College Library Balliol MCR ‘in the first three months of 1945, I raped my way and ’50s are drawn in broadly exaggerated strokes (with the result that the characters involved come Exeter MCR across what would soon become East Germany.’ Harris Manchester MCR This, he explains, was nothing unusual: ‘I marched across as comic-strip grotesques), the descriptions of the children’s slaughter in Northern Ossetia recall Hertford JCR with the rapist army,’ and ‘the peer group can make Jesus MCR recent horror without the application of any distorting people do anything, and do it day in day out.’ In 1948, Jesus JCR he was sent to a Soviet labour camp: ‘I was a “socially prism: ‘the bomb falls from the basketball hoop and Linacre CR hostile element”, a political, a fascist.’ Conditions in the roof of the gym comes down. And if you were Magdalen MCR the Gulag were horrific, with camp life organised like a killer, then this was your time. It is not given to New College JCR a human version of Orwell’s animal farm: the pigs many—the chance to shoot children in the back as Pembroke MCR (guards), the ‘urkas’ (common criminals), the snakes they swerve in their underwear past rotting corpses.’ St. Catherine’s MCR St. Hugh’s MCR (informers), the leeches (fraudsters), the fascists The Beslan siege is but the most recent in a series of St. John’s MCR (dissidents), the locusts (juveniles), and the shiteaters Balliol College (who have sunk too low to belong to any group). By major world events to which the novel alludes. In its attempt to tease out the causes of Russia’s disastrous Campion Hall the time his younger brother Lev arrives at the same Corpus Christi College past and to set it in a global context, House of Meetings camp, our narrator is in a position to extend some Exeter College savvy survival tips: ‘I told him that the acceptance of takes in huge swathes of space (‘Geography did it’) Jesus College murder was the thing that was being asked of him.’ and time (‘History did it’). Amis makes mention of Magdalen College a number of twentieth-century disasters in his novel, Merton College The brothers’ relationship is fraught from the first, locked including not only the two World Wars, the Holocaust, St. John’s College as it is in the most immovable of love triangles. Its third the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the Soviet-Afghan Centre for Jewish and Hebrew Studies War of the 1980s, but also recent events such as the point is Zoya (or The Americas)—a beautiful Jewess th whom both brothers love, and whom Lev weds before Columbine School Massacre in 1999, September 11 , his arrest. News of the marriage casts a momentous and the siege of the Moscow Dubrovka in 2002. These shadow over the brothers’ reunion, and their poisonous references to such disparate events weaken the narrative The Oxonian Review of Books was founded in 2001 and features essays and reviews of recently published work rivalry dominates the narrative until its final pages. structure too much for the book’s own good. In trying to include too much that is ‘real’, Amis risks dispelling in literature, politics, history, science and the arts. It is his readers’ interest in the fictional plot centred published three times a year by graduate members of Lev is his brother’s opposite, as is typical in Amis’s the University of Oxford, although it welcomes con- novels. He is ugly. He is small. He is an ‘intelligent’. He on his main characters, rendering them even more remote than they already seem by virtue of tributions from other University members. Contribu- has an atrocious stutter. But through gentleness and tors bear sole responsibility for its content, which in perseverance, Lev has succeeded where his brother no way reflects the views of the University of Oxford. failed: he has found a way to Zoya’s philandering heart. continued on page 4 All works are copyright of their respective authors. 4 the Oxonian Review of Books spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 At the Helm with Gore Vidal continued from page 3 Andrew Hay Martin Amis Gore Vidal Garbo being a mere smattering of the powerful Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir figures Vidal counted as friends and acquaintances. their violent deeds and dangerous values (for the Little, Brown, 2006 narrator, after all, violence is ‘a neutral instrument’). 288 pages The lack of humility in this panorama of glitz— ISBN: 0316027278 perhaps unsurprisingly—irritates some critics. When The book’s unity is also threatened by Amis’s use of his reviewing Point to Point Navigation under the title ‘Too unreliable narrator. Indeed, the opinions the narrator Much Gore,’ Allen Barra writes that ‘the personal expresses—about Russia and about the world—are note in Vidal’s work, whether he was ostensibly noticeably similar to those the author has recently writing about politics, literature, aviation, or anything vented in press interviews, and in a recent essay (‘The The first thing that will catch the eye of most readers else, was never “occasional.” The “geography” Age of Horrorism’, published in The Guardian in who pick up Gore Vidal’s Point to Point Navigation: A of his own life has been virtually his only subject’. September 2006) about what Amis calls ‘Islamism’. Memoir is the striking jacket photo of the author himself. Amis is a man with a message, and House of Meetings Here we see the 82-year- old Vidal in black and white, his This seems to miss the point. The world of Vidal’s argues his point. The problem is that, occasionally, face still handsome, with eyes that express a mixture of fiction has always attempted to marry the delineation Amis’s own voice is too thinly disguised by his experience and intelligence. If it seems strange to open of character, the depiction of society and le mot juste. In novelistic mouthpiece, which diminishes the character’s a review by pondering the image on the book rather this memoir, as in his essays, style is (almost) all. And coherence and credibility. The narrator has two main than what lies inside it, then it has to be remembered since Vidal is so stylish a writer and this text is a memoir, sets of woes. The first is regarding Russia’s tormented that image has always been integral to Gore Vidal’s place to beat up the author for too much self suggests that past and the state’s continuing failure to atone: ‘Say in the pantheon of great American literary celebrities. Point to Point Navigation is nothing more than an ego trip. sorry, someone. Someone tell me they’re sorry.’ The Thus, Barra glosses over its many subtleties and varieties. second set of grievances concerns the ideology of Of course, to be a celebrity is, by definition, to have the West. The narrator connects ‘Westernism’ with an image in public consciousness. But Vidal, like An attentive reader of Montaigne’s essays, Vidal the ‘numbness of advanced democracy’ and with a any brilliant stylist, exerts a scrupulous control over understands all too well the many ways in which authors crippling political correctness: ‘You have a censor his self-presentation whether in print or photo. At can confront memory and the self in writing. In Palimpsest living in your head.’ What the narrator ultimately times this self-presentation can seem a bit recherché: he asserted that ‘a memoir is how one remembers advocates, by way of unfortunately massive, if self- any author who surmises his own life as ‘a banquet one’s own life.’ In this respect it is fitting that, of the conscious, generalizations (‘I worship generalizations’), of sex, wealth and beauty’ might stand justly few famous people Vidal mentions he failed to meet, is freedom from any ideology. As the narrator explains accused of being a little too conscious of image. Vladimir Nabokov was one such luminary. In his great text to his stepdaughter, ‘all your life I’ve tried to interest Speak Memory (1951), Nabokov writes of ‘depopulating you in my ideology: the ideology of no ideology.’ In interview, too, Vidal has a gift for the grandiose. With bit by bit our own past.’ In one sense, this is exactly what a keen sense of irony, he famously remarked that ‘there Vidal is doing. But his depopulating manifests itself in Martin Amis once stated that ‘If you read a good is not one human problem that could not be solved glamorous, comic, tragic and formally interesting ways. novel, things should look a little richer and more if people would simply do as I advise.’ Consequently, complicated.’ Amis has managed this brilliantly charges of vanity, narcissism and egotism abound in the The memoir itself is structured through the interspersing before. In Time’s Arrow (2003), he dealt innovatively context of both Gore Vidal as a man and his literary of past and present, rather than chronologically. Indeed, and sensitively with the Holocaust from the point of work, which is so inextricable from his glamorous life even if there were nothing more than socialising with view of a Nazi ‘doctor’. In Night Train, he compellingly amongst the great and the good of Anglo-American the crème de la crème in Point to Point Navigation, Vidal is interwove the dark stories of two female suicides. In and European high society. As his celebrated earlier such an accomplished raconteur that the reader can take both of these earlier novels, Amis experimented with memoir, Palimpsest (1995), records, Vidal’s birth into genuine pleasure in the finely sketched world of political new subjects (state violence, female distress) as well America’s political and social elite might have helped power and celebrity glamour in which he is ensconced as new techniques (the most striking of these being with the glitz, but the grist of his literary mill has been when not writing and researching in Italy. He writes that: the inverted timeline). House of Meetings would have a sprawling historical, political, and cultural knowledge, benefited from a good dose of novelty. It reads too unflinching humanity in the face of American Although I have never enjoyed large parties, much like a compendium of all of Amis’s earlier novels, political ignobility and sheer hard literary graft. when Howard arrived in Rome we went to in spite of its new subject-matter. Amis’s characters are quite a few, largely to see the interiors of a too caricatural to make the world look richer and more From the publication of Williwaw (1946) at the age number of palaces. […] Grace [Kelly] and I complicated. The author seems regrettably wary of of just twenty-one followed by the infamous tale chatted about distant romantic Hollywood. arousing emotion, though he has shown—not least in of homosexuality, The City and the Pillar (1948), to his autobiography, Experience (2000) —that he can do so his imaginings of political life, ancient and modern, Distant glamour notwithstanding, it would be a exceptionally well. The novel’s themes, structures, and (Julian (1964), Creation (1981), the 1987 Narratives grave mistake to reduce Point to Point Navigation to a jokes are all too familiar: there are the ridiculous names, of Empire series) alongside a prodigious amount catalogue of opulent party-going. The tonal range of the frequent and overt references to other authors, the of journalistic, essayistic and critical writings, the memoir is infinitely more varied than that. The fraternal doubles, the amorous triangles, the scatological screenplay writing, acting, and political participation, title of the memoir, for example, is a case in point. imperative, the extreme comic-strip violence, the then if ever the title Renaissance Man were to On one level it refers to the process of ‘charting’ repressed homosexuality, the obsessive sexualisation be applied, Vidal would be the ideal candidate. life but it also pertains to a particularly dangerous of everything. Some things have changed, it is true: process of navigation, without the aid of a compass, women, for instance, are portrayed in much more The tale is all the more astonishing because Vidal’s which Vidal carried out while serving on a freight diverse, less misogynistic terms than in earlier novels. prodigious output did not interfere in any way with ship during World War Two. Aside from Vidal’s life Such departures (and there are others in the book) make his existence as a brilliant social entity who seems to in the War and his political apprenticeship, there are for some compelling moments, which the reader craves. have known everyone of any significance from birth. passages of superlative poignancy, as exemplified If the reader were to explicate all the name dropping in his depiction of the death of Howard Auster, the House of Meetings gives the impression of an author that permeates Point to Point Navigation it would surely author’s partner of 53 years. Vidal writes of how: keen to give us everything we have ever liked about comprise a book in itself. A few brief examples: his works in a single book. But the result inevitably Leto shouted ‘Mr Auster has stopped breathing!’ makes for a less, rather than more, engrossing I used to chat with Prince Philip of Hesse, […] He was still in the armchair, facing the read. The novel is less funny, less touching, and less the only person I ever knew who knew Hitler. window […] Montaigne requires that I describe technically dazzling than what readers have come to […] I must get dressed for lunch with Crown more how he looked—rather than how I felt. The expect. Amis has a passionate following of readers Princess Chumbhot. […] It was a small lift eyes were open and very clear. I’d forgotten what who want nothing more than to love his novels. What lined with mirrors. Halfway down it stopped to a beautiful grey they were—illness and medicine he needs to do, perhaps, is to accept that it might admit another passenger. […] Our eyes met in had regularly glazed them over; now they were be best not to use all of his dazzling creative skills mutual shock: it was Jackie Kennedy Onassis. bright and attentive and he was watching me, at once. And he needs to surprise us, as he used to. consciously, through long lashes. Lungs, heart Furthermore, the inside-flap of Point to Point may have stopped but the optic nerves were still Navigation provides yet another striking image: a sending messages to a brain which, those who Scarlett Baron is a DPhil student in English literature at fresco where all the painted heads have been replaced should know tell us, does not immediately shut Christ Church, Oxford. She is writing about the influence of by photos of the myriad characters that surface in down. So we stared at each other at the end. Flaubert on James Joyce. the narrative of this book: Jackie Onassis, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bette Davis, John F. Kennedy and Greta continued on page 7 spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 the Oxonian Review of Books 5 Making Up Real Things Alexandra Harris

Alice Munro Munro has rarely needed to deviate from the short story: Munro is drawn to wonderers, but she is fair—and The View from Castle Rock she can translate all other literary forms into her own. sometimes very funny—in her dealings with anti- Chatto & Windus, 2006 The capacious genre she has invented and perfected for wonderers too. Exasperated by her family’s seemingly 349 pages herself can be epic, lyric, tragic, novelistic—and many ascetic devotion to fact, Munro makes brilliantly ironic ISBN: 9780701179892 things at once. These genealogical-autobiographical use of their surviving papers. A journal composed on stories pay more attention ‘to the truth of life than the crossing to Canada doggedly records every detail fiction usually does’ she says, ‘but not enough to of the weather, while steering clear of those unwieldy swear on.’ Munro’s joyful assertion of her right to human affairs that Munro delights to insert. The journal- go on ‘making it up’ becomes a playful challenge. writer’s sister-in-law gives birth, but this does not seem For over half a century Alice Munro has been writing to count for much: there having been a surgeon on board sane, patient stories about unpredictable Canadian The triumph of ‘making it up’ is the story that underlies to attend her, ‘nothing happened,’ and so back to the women whose convention-fenced rural lives are full of all others in The View from Castle Rock. The struggle for weather. It’s up to Munro to suggest that long-suffering open gateways through which immeasurable horrors the right to invent, and to think for thinking’s sake, is Agnes has been hallucinating for days, feeling beaten enter while impatient, anarchic imaginations rush out. carried on tenaciously beneath the struggle to clear land, by waves, drinking poison, or supporting a cow on her Her name is often paired with that of her far showier build houses, and feed children. It is a right not easily stomach. But lest we think the journal-writer heartless, compatriot Margaret Atwood, who stages dramatic won: Munro’s story-tellers are forever embarrassing there is a suggestion that he longs to touch Agnes, and feats in the sky while Munro walks firmly over the same their relatives, holding forth while others cringe. Her cannot bear to write about her. Perhaps, then, it is tacit tract of earth peering under stones. Critical studies heroines are people who want to invent themselves and love, not indifference, that has edited her out of history. and biographies of Munro are already accumulating. others but are told to be quiet and eat their dinner. This Laudatory review snippets spill over to the inside has been going on throughout her fiction, and through Munro’s career has been devoted to those times when covers of her books: ‘genius... miraculous... Mansfield... four centuries of Laidlaw forbears: ‘Self-dramatisation ‘nothing happened,’ nothing except the raging, savage Chekhov... Joyce.’ Jonathan Franzen’s introduction got short shrift in our family,’ she remarks, referring emotional adventures that make up people’s lives. She to her superb 2004 collection Runaway proselytised back to the myth-makers and fabulists of Ettrick but attends to what is omitted from records and what is easily fiercely, as if calling worshippers to a new religion. recognising the same conflicts around her own kitchen forgotten. (‘I forgot Mr Mountjoy almost immediately,’ table. In the endless daily round of physical survival, she says, at the end of a story which has slowly, elliptically While all this noisy admiration was happening, moments of dreaming and lying under trees become acts remembered him.) But there are many writers who Munro travelled to the Scottish lowlands, boarded a of principled defiance. Munro studies communities in specialise in ‘nothing happened,’ and what distinguishes shoppers’ bus to dreary Ettrick and rooted about in which love of ‘Nature’ (a conspicuously romantic word) Munro is the bizarre, unmediated relationship between the rain for the graves of her ancestors. This is the must be hidden, and in which imaginative intelligence the forgettable and the extraordinary. There is no valley from which her family emigrated, having first is often put ‘in the same category as a lump or an extra middle ground. The humdrum jostles with the looked out from Castle Rock in Edinburgh and (with thumb,’ classed as a disability that prevents one from sensational, and Munro is as much a sensationalist as the help of a little brandy) mistaken Fife for the New getting things done. Reading is held responsible not the Victorian gothic fantasists her heroines so like to World that would become ‘home.’ Ettrick is also the only for arrogance but for madness and delusion, as read. Not permitted to ‘draw attention’ to themselves starting point for Munro’s latest collection, in which in the enormous, desolate story ‘A Wilderness Station’, in life, her people die spectacularly. There are macabre she imagines the lives of her forbears and places which appeared in Open Secrets (1994) and demands accidents and theatrical suicides—in sawmills or stories from her own life in relation to them. The to be read again alongside The View from Castle Rock. under trains. Houses are treacherous places where pioneer families send out feelers to the future; Munro dressers fall on children and gas lamps explode. follows her roots back into the past. It is intensely There are senseless deaths and acts of wild justice: personal, and it feels like a slow, rich summing up. a violent father is electrocuted in a barn, not having put on the rubber boots that might have saved him. The View from Castle Rock begins and ends in graveyards. Some of the characters in these stories feel dubious This new collection, more than its predecessors, about the significance of these places. To them, it downplays the grotesque and is circumspect about doesn’t always seem worth travelling miles ‘to say sensations. Grim fascination is permissible, but goodbye to a stone.’ But to Munro, it is worth crossing never theatre or sentiment. Everything is narrated continents to do so. The epilogue finds her trampling evenly, calmly, in prose that is as resistant to metaphor around amid rampant poison ivy on a little patch of as the Presbyterian preachers of Ettrick. So while wild land between a golf course and a string of new Munro is scathing about religious righteousness houses, looking in vain for the grave of her great-great- (her fiction warns very seriously against judgements grandfather. No sign. But ‘I could pursue this,’ she says, and condescension), the religious culture of her ‘It’s what people do’: ‘we can’t resist this rifling around in ancestors has left its mark on her aesthetics. Here, the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence [...] insisting more than ever, she is a Protestant writer, respectful on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.’ of plain style. Her language is transparent like clear When life is at risk, this urge to join up with the past church windows. Nothing is blurred or tendentious; is at its most urgent. In the last story of the sequence there are no quick pleasures or rhetorical extras. Munro fills in the time left to her before an operation by investigating crypts in ancient cemeteries. More Munro demands patience and close attention. It is trampling—and some visits to her college library which hard work to keep up with all of her great-great uncles (perversely) won’t let her take out books because she did and friends of cousins (the family tree I was sketching not graduate. The irony is potent, as one of the great This is why it is so moving to find Munro making went wrong at the fifth generation and I never quite Canadian writers of the twentieth century borrows excuses for her presence in the library. She is still regained my bearings). None of these pieces, except her husband’s library ticket and evades suspicious fending off those who are suspicious of story-tellers, the last, is as completely absorbing as Munro at her librarians to go ‘poking about’ in the stacks, passing and she is still telling stories about those who have had very best (the Juliet stories in 2004’s Runaway or ‘Carried herself off as a grey-haired amateur genealogist. to do the same. When the desire to read, to learn and Away’ in Open Secrets). It is not always necessary to to imagine is accepted as natural, Alice Munro feels that turn the page. But to do so is to appreciate, with The View from Castle Rock is the result of much rifling, something great has been achieved. While investigating Munro, the grandeur of cumulative small acts, the trampling, poking, but it refuses to be straightforward the strange crypt spotted in a cemetery she calls on routine cruelty of relationships, the wisdom earned investigative family history. Letters, journals and local people to ask what they know about it, and in the by attending carefully to what is easily overlooked. epitaphs are the starting points from which fiction takes process she notices ‘something new.’ For once her desire For all their suddenness and surprise these are slow- off—what Munro calls ‘a curious re-creation of lives.’ for knowledge is not met with suspicion or contempt. release stories that keep growing larger and larger The ancestral imaginings of the first section (wryly No one suggests that they have better things to think long after you finish reading. You turn around and entitled ‘No Advantages’ after an eighteenth-century about, ‘Real things, that is. Real work.’ These are not there they are again, filling practical life with fantasies. account of Ettrick that describes the parish as having literary people, or even ‘city people.’ One of them even just that, ‘no advantages’) are joined in a formally turns out to have worked on the Laidlaw turkey farm. Alexandra Harris is a DPhil student at Christ Church, structured diptych with the personal fictions of the They are, like Munro, descendents of the pioneers, Oxford. She is writing about English art and literature of the second half. The stories are based on Munro’s own life and amid the demands of practical necessity they have 1930s and 1940s. but are, again, freely recast. This generic cross-breeding found room in their lives for looking and wondering. (memoir, history, fiction) makes clear yet again why 6 the Oxonian Review of Books spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 Love Among the Ruins Jacob Foster

S.S. Schweber theoretical division at Los Alamos during the war, Bethe an antidote to contemporary scientific triumphalism. In the Shadow of the Bomb directed the essential calculations behind the implosion Oppenheimer’s relativist and pluralist stance Princeton University Press, 2006 device that dawned over Trinity and devastated externalized a radical personal complexity. His 288 pages Nagasaki. Like almost all Los Alamos scientists, Bethe friend George Kennan described him as ‘a bundle of was deeply disturbed by the reports from Hiroshima marvelous contradictions’; his nemesis Edward Teller ISBN: 0691127859 and Nagasaki. When the U.S. began its drive for the testified in Oppenheimer’s 1954 security hearing that hydrogen bomb, Bethe declared it ‘a terrible error.’ But ‘I would like to see the vital interests of this country when he perceived that its development was inevitable, in hands which I understand better and therefore trust In the years before his death in 1967, J. Robert Bethe realised that he could most effectively advocate more.’ Oppenheimer’s science mirrored his drive to Oppenheimer was perhaps the most famous living disarmament from within Los Alamos. Thus Bethe ‘go beyond’ and his failure to integrate his internal physicist in the world. A universal genius, he wrote again played a pivotal theoretical role in the design contradictions and complexity. He pushed constantly poetry and read the Bhagavad Gita in the original of a terrible weapon, this one even more fearsome and everywhere along the boundary of the known, Sanskrit. In the world of physics, he made seminal because it was a weapon of genocide. Crucially, it was driven to tackle problems too difficult even for one contributions to our understanding of molecules, this continued technical involvement with weapons of his genius. Schweber notes that Oppenheimer, quantum field theory, and astrophysics. Despite this research that provided Bethe the practical authority ‘conscious of his fracturedness,’ yearned for ‘wholeness work, he never received the Nobel Prize. Then and to argue for disarmament, and Bethe played a central and a more integrated self.’ Yet this unity would forever now, his fame rests on the events of July 16, 1945. role in a 1963 ban on atmospheric testing, as well as evade him; Schweber makes a moving comparison opposing the Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s. to Nietzsche’s ‘man without any power to forget At 5:29 am, dawn burst violet-fingered and terrible who is condemned to see “becoming” everywhere.’ over the New Mexican desert near Alamogordo. As It is through the lives of these two men—not parallel so At last, ‘he will hardly dare to raise his finger.’ the flash faded and the desert trembled to the roar of much as ‘entangled’—that Silvan Schweber examines a new world being born, Oppenheimer thought of a the timely question: What are the moral responsibilities In contrast, Bethe’s Kantian universalism flowed line from the Bhagavad Gita: ‘I am become Death, the of the scientist? The book that emerges from Schweber’s into, and perhaps from, his personal and professional destroyer of worlds.’ Less than ten years after he had ruminations is difficult but important. Although written integrity. His friends speak of his remarkable serenity, ushered that awful Trinity of light, smoke, and thunder in the context of an ongoing biographical project on of his ability to ‘act decisively as a moral agent’; he into existence, Oppenheimer—the archetypal insider Bethe, In the Shadow of the Bomb is not a biography of was not a man in conflict with himself, but could and charismatic leader of the scientific community— either Oppenheimer or Bethe. In fact, it expects that rationally integrate (perhaps rationalise) his actions, was a broken outsider: crucified by Communist witch- the reader is familiar with much of the contemporary even so far as deciding to work on the H-bomb. hunters and the military establishment for his guilty physics and history. But one need not submit to an Bethe’s drive towards integration even appeared in opposition to the nuclear arms race, shunned by many undergraduate training in physics before approaching his science, which was characterized both by the of his colleagues for his shameful and unsuccessful this book. Much of the relevant physics and history synthesis of fields (in the case of his many famous attempt to avoid persecution by naming names. can be gleaned from reading one of the excellent recent review articles) and by the analysis of how reductive biographies of Oppenheimer. Jeremy Bernstein’s parts combine into synthetic wholes (for example, his Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma (2004) is a fine, short work on nuclei or the source of energy in the sun). introduction, with Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus (2005) the undisputed authority Bethe and Oppenheimer’s experience of community on Oppenheimer’s life and times. Armed with some provides an interesting lens through which to examine background, the reader can appreciate the twin virtues their personalities, integrated and fractured. Both men of Schweber’s book: its tight focus on Oppenheimer treasured community, and indeed Oppenheimer was the and Bethe’s moral development and agency, and its leader of two of the most remarkable communities in extensive use of original sources to drive the story. the history of physics. In addition to the extraordinary laboratory at Los Alamos, Oppie’s group at Berkeley In Schweber’s view, both Oppenheimer and Bethe comprised the largest and the best school of theoretical are ‘children of the Enlightenment.’ He takes his physics that America had ever seen. Bethe wrote of understanding of Enlightenment from Foucault, who Los Alamos that ‘it was an unforgettable experience identified it as ‘an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical [...] I never observed in any one of these other groups life in which the critique of what we are is at one quite the spirit of belonging together, quite the urge to and the same time the historical analysis of the reminisce about the days of the laboratory, quite the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment feeling that this was really the great time of their lives.’ with the possibility of going beyond them.’ Both men had imbibed this Enlightenment attitude from their schooling: Oppenheimer in the Ethical Culture Robert Oppenheimer School and Bethe in the Gymnasium. But while Oppenheimer sought to write Bethe remained a true Kantian, believing in the large a personal struggle: in Hans Bethe, one of the eulogists at Oppenheimer’s universalism of principles like knowledge, reason, funeral, outlived his friend and colleague by several truth, progress, Oppenheimer developed an almost the first case, to wash his hands decades, dying in 2005 at the age of 98. Bethe was in postmodern worldview, striving always to ‘go beyond’ of the blood of Hiroshima many ways the professional mirror of Oppenheimer. the limits of his present circumstance and moment. Unlike the temperamental ‘Oppie’, whose Berkeley and Nagasaki; in the second, group worked on virtually every significant problem Oppenheimer’s moral stance was certainly relativist. He in theoretical physics in the 1930s, Bethe was a wrote to George Kennan in 1951, ‘What I question is to maintain integrity against ‘master craftsman,’ insisting on a total command our ability to put ourselves, as a nation, in the place of the centrifugal force of his of established technique in his chosen field. While these other peoples and decide what is right or wrong Oppie essentially stopped doing physics after World in the light of their standards and traditions.’ This manifold intellectual passions. War II, Bethe remained productive into his eighties; moral relativism, remarkable in its Cold War context, while Oppie’s ambition in attacking every difficult was complemented by a vigorous intellectual pluralism. problem excluded him from the elite circle of Nobel In 1959 Oppenheimer wrote, ‘Only a malignant end prize winners, Bethe’s focussed, careful analysis can follow the systematic belief that all communities In both cases, Oppenheimer was not first among dramatically demonstrated that nuclear reactions are one community; that all truth is one truth; [...] that equals—he was the animating genius. At Berkeley, he were the source of the sun’s energy and earned him total knowledge is possible.’ One year later he noted was the centre of his students’ intellectual and social the 1967 Nobel Prize in physics. Oppenheimer may that ‘No part of science follows, really from any other world, while at Los Alamos he was, in Bethe’s words, have been in some sense more brilliant, but there in any usable form [...] One is dealing with a wholly ‘a leader [who] brought out the best in all of us, like a is no doubt that Bethe was the greater physicist. different order of nature.’ These prophetic words are good host with his guests.’ Both communities were a refreshing counterpoint in the current debate on urgently committed to their goals, and this common Bethe also played a greater role in averting nuclear ‘consilience,’ the unity of all human knowledge. They purpose allowed Oppenheimer to overcome his holocaust. Hand-picked by Oppenheimer to head the present a modest and humanist vision of science’s scope, personal flaws and bring his enormous charisma to spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 the Oxonian Review of Books 7

bear in forging ‘the spirit of belonging together.’ continued engagement with the weapons community he lived ‘the life that Oppenheimer had described.’ But in the post-atomic wasteland, with moral and that gave him the moral gravity and technical insight Because he learned to ‘express love through his intellectual bearings universally disordered and to argue for the goals of disarmament to which work’ and ‘to express his love openly in words,’ Bethe fragmented, Oppenheimer’s charisma and reach proved he was committed. He remained convinced that was able to transcend the sins of Los Alamos; he his undoing. Overconfident from his success at Berkeley the H-bomb was an ‘evil thing,’ writing in 1950: ‘helped himself, helped others, and helped mankind.’ and Los Alamos, Oppenheimer sought, and briefly wore, the mantle of scientist-statesman, becoming It is argued that it would be better for us to lose our the representative of the entire scientific community. lives than our liberty; and this I personally agree In assuming this enormous responsibility—in effect with. But I believe that this is not the question; I Bethe, who had been a loner shouldering the entire moral burden of the scientific believe that we would lose far more than our lives in before his Los Alamos community himself—Oppenheimer unwittingly began a war fought with hydrogen bombs, that we would the journey to his personal Calvary. Oppenheimer in fact lose all our liberties and human values at days, took away the true approached Truman in 1946 and explained that ‘I have the same time, and so thoroughly that we would meaning of Los Alamos: the blood on my hands,’ deeply offending the President. not recover them for an unforeseeably long time. Oppenheimer’s subsequent, tireless activity within the importance of community as corridors of power, particularly his effort to prevent These words were remarkable in the moment, and it the design of the H-bomb and forge a ‘Soviet- is even more remarkable (and perhaps disturbing) that an end in itself, and the value American agreement to ban [its] testing,’ made him they remain relevant in the present-day war on terror. of ‘small’ aims in shaping the symbol of the scientific community’s meddlesome Bethe saw that the existential threat posed by Soviet presumption among dissenting elements of the military communism necessitated, in a way, the balance of terror. and guiding that community. and national security apparatus. As these political But after this threat had passed, Bethe spoke in 1995 enemies plotted Oppenheimer’s downfall, seeking to at Los Alamos to ‘call on all scientists in all countries make him a cautionary example, his all-too-human to cease and desist from work creating, developing, moral failures rendered him an unwitting accomplice. improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons.’ Oppenheimer’s thoughts at Trinity proved prophetic. In Schwerber writes extensively of Oppie’s appalling He had succeeded where Oppenheimer had failed; there the shattered landscape of the atomic age, Oppenheimer conduct in betraying Bernard Peters to the House was no blood on Bethe’s hands when he died. He also stood apart and alone, a July morning’s mushroom cloud Committee on Un-American Activities, and quotes succeeded in building a vibrant intellectual community, reminding us that in its shadow ‘we can help, because Victor Weisskopf ’s plaintive letter to Oppenheimer indeed a family, at the Cornell physics department, we can love, one another.’ As for Bethe, he remained ‘til on the Peters affair: ‘we are all losing something where he would remain until his death. It was this the end of his days as he had been at Trinity, standing that is irreparable. Namely confidence in you.’ community that afforded Bethe the occasion, and before the ruin with his colleagues—his friends. perhaps the courage, to take ‘forthright stands’ during Yet Oppenheimer’s deepest disappointment came at the the McCarthy era for the rights and the democratic values Bethe remarked after Trinity, ‘It was too much to Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he had he cherished, displaying great moral strength in defense say anything.’ We owe a debt of gratitude to this become director in 1947. Driven by his catholic interests of his colleague Philip Morrison—in stark contrast brave man, who would learn to say something and near-infinite intellectual reach, Oppenheimer had to Oppenheimer’s moral weakness in the Peters case. through both his words and his life. To make hoped to create there a replica of the camaraderie of this debt so plain is Schweber’s greatest triumph. Los Alamos. While surveying the fractured intellectual landscape and accepting that it would be misguided to Jacob Foster is a DPhil student in mathematical physics at search for any unifying system of ideas, he dreamed that Balliol College, Oxford, and a PhD student in complexity science at least a community of respect and fellowship could at the University of Calgary. His current interests include the be built across the disciplines. In this he experienced mathematical properties of complex networks to the geometry of bitter failure. His friend Kennan wrote that ‘he himself the Big Bang. remained so largely alone in his ability to bridge in a single inner world those wholly disparate workings of the human intellect.’ In both cases Oppenheimer had sought to write large a personal struggle: in the first continued from page 4 case, to wash his hands of the blood of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; in the second, to maintain integrity against the centrifugal force of his manifold intellectual Gore Vidal passions. Yet in both instances, his inability to leave his This gradual falling away of those who comprise the personal struggles behind condemned him to speak of centre and periphery of Vidal’s life is the recurring a fellowship and a community he himself could never theme of Point to Point Navigation. Yet, without a achieve, and from which he was forever excluded. compass or the familiar points that constitute his life as ‘most of my contemporaries are vanishing,’ Bethe’s modesty and the circumscription of his aims Vidal remains perspicacious and stylish. For all the allowed him to succeed where Oppenheimer failed. poignancy involved in assessing one’s life as it ‘goes Oppenheimer had come away from Los Alamos Hans Bethe out’—as his hero Montaigne puts it—he is rational: convinced of both his terrible personal responsibility but he is a stylish rationalist. Thus, when he examines and of his enormous powers to forge and lead a In the end, Oppenheimer and Bethe represent two ‘a new cancer on my forearm, all the while waiting for community. Bethe, who had been a loner before his possible responses to the failure of Enlightenment diabetes to do its gaudy final thing,’ we are reminded Los Alamos days, took away the true meaning of values in the nuclear age. Both responses emphasise the of Montaigne, who is quoted slightly earlier, asserting Los Alamos: the importance of community as an importance of fellowship, with one’s fellow scientists that death is simply ‘part of life.’ As Point to Point end in itself, and the value of ‘small’ aims in shaping and with one’s fellow human beings. But in practice Navigation conveys, it has been quite a life for Gore and guiding that community. Although the design Oppenheimer’s response was deeply personal. He held Vidal. It would be gratifying to read more from him and construction of the first atomic bomb was himself ultimately and irredeemably responsible for and one can only hope his prognostication that this certainly enormously difficult and of world-historical the tragedy of Trinity, and could never forgive himself will be his final memoir is wrong. But if Point to Point import, as an aim it was specific and ‘small,’ nothing this terrible sin, nor forget the blood on his hands. His Navigation were Vidal’s ‘final thing,’ the emotional poise compared to the moral struggle or the pan-disciplinary act of radical ambition—to take up responsibility for and the variety of its recollections alongside the dignity community Oppenheimer had envisioned after the war. science’s fall from grace—drove Oppenheimer into a of the life it presents go a long way to proving that personal wilderness from which he could only cry out, underpinning all Vidal’s style is an ocean of substance. Hence Bethe understood that the struggle to prevent exhorting the listener of his 1954 lecture on Christmas nuclear holocaust was the responsibility of the Day ‘to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, entire scientific community, and he never sought to what he can do, to his friends and his tradition and Andrew Hay is a DPhil student in English literature at Bal- the mantle of scientist-statesman. Rather he was his love, lest he be dissolved in a universal confusion liol College, Oxford. He works on issues of modernity in literary content to remain a craftsman, participating in and know nothing and love nothing’. Bethe’s response Modernism, and ideas of postmodern phenomenal and aesthetic weapons research on a technical level, and it was this is heart-wrenchingly summarised by Schweber: experience.

8 the Oxonian Review of Books spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 Pierre Trudeau: A Catholic Conscience John-Paul McCarthy

John English as part of a federal Canadian union based on individual and ephemeral as Demosthenes’ orations before the Citizen of the World. The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Volume rights and legal equality between the French and English empty sea. (Trudeau’s labours here were not entirely One, 1919-1968 languages. To his Quebecois detractors, he was simply a without recompense. At his last conference with Knopf Canada, 2006 vendu, a local version of the self-hating Jew, the federal President Reagan he was rewarded with one of Ron’s 567 pages bully who locked Quebec out of the key constitutional more imperishable insights on the dialectics of the ISBN 0676975216 negotiations in 1981, the spoilt brat son of a millionaire Middle East. ‘Look Pierre,’ he said, ‘we’re a God- who mocked Quebec’s distinct kind of joual French, fearing people, the Jews are a God-fearing people, the fanatical opponent of even the most minimal and the Arabs are a God fearing people. Why can’t concession to Quebec’s cultural distinctness who was we all just get together and fight the Communists?’) Ramsay Cook rewarded with the 1995 referendum that brought The Teeth of Time. Remembering Pierre Elliott Trudeau Canada within a hair’s breadth of formal disintegration. In his elegant memoir of their intellectual friendship McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. over forty years, historian Ramsay Cook explains that 224 pages In Citizen of the World, English shows however that Trudeau unexpectedly ran for federal office in 1965 ISBN 0773531491 Trudeau’s emergence as the most formidable federalist after nearly thirty year’s study of Quebec politics politician within post-war Quebec was a close run thing, when he concluded that Quebec’s new liberalism after itself the product of an astonishing feat of personal Duplessis was itself chauvinistic. His analysis here was and intellectual transformation in the aftermath of momentous for the future development of Canada 1945. For up to this point, Trudeau was actually a and is in many ways his most enduring intellectual rather nasty Quebec nationalist, a hopeless mama’s insight. Those social liberals who were also out and boy, an admirer of Pétain’s Vichy prone to casual anti- out Quebec nationalists in search of a sovereign Semitism and an enthusiastic student of some of the Laurentie were one thing. He worried more intensely Pierre Trudeau’s death in 2000 provoked some most lethal race theorists of that era. English’s elegant about the less strident liberals who lacked the self- extraordinary scenes. Fidel Castro dusted down analysis of his development describes the manner in confidence or the local insight to challenge separatist a handsome suit for the funeral mass, Trudeau’s which this unusually intense young man began the arguments on their merits. His falling out with the eldest son Justin bid his father a startling Caesarean process of thinking his way out of the nationalist federal New Democratic Party, which might have been adieu (‘Friends, Romans, countrymen!’) and the axioms he absorbed during his formative years. a natural political home for him in other circumstances, UN Security Council adjourned in mourning. followed the socialists’ acceptance of the Quebec Between his graduation magna cum laude from the Brébuef nationalist definition of Canada as deux nations and Perhaps the most memorable response however was Jesuits in the late 1930s and his quixotic decision to their fateful argument that social justice necessitated that of a random woman interviewed in Toronto as run for the federal Parliament as one of Mike Pearson’s some kind of national recognition for the province. she stopped to sign a book of condolence. With Liberals in 1965, Trudeau read and Trudeau travelled. the modesty of somebody who looked like she had He learned his federalism at Harold Laski’s famous Trudeau’s argument that liberalism was too easily never been ambushed by a slobbering cable journalist LSE seminars in 1947 before completing his anti-fascist mesmerised by nationalistic tantrums, no matter how before, this gorgeous blonde of a certain age shyly education at the École Normale Supérieur in Paris and at feeble the arguments advanced or how momentous recalled how Pierre Trudeau changed her life at the Harvard (where he took classes with Heinrich Brüning, the consequences of the concession sought, might height of the Vietnamese Boat People catastrophe. Germany’s last Kanzler before Hitler.) Afterwards, he usefully be pondered by any number of political Crying softly while looking at her shoes, she said: kicked the chauvinistic dust of Duplessis’ Quebec constituencies in contemporary debates. His insistence from his heels on a solitary world tour. He prayed with that nationalistic arguments were frequently just fig I was sitting in a little Salvation Army church Taoist monks at dusk in the ancient Chinese city of leaves for old-fashioned power-grabs and the grossest in eastern Europe when the minister said Hangzhou and threw snowballs at Lenin’s statue in kind of ethnic calculation applies as elegantly to 1960s that our Prime Minister in Canada was Red Square. Canadian embassies dreaded his arrival Quebec nationalism as it does to events today. Tariq allowing the Vietnamese people in. Because whilst women of various descriptions apparently Ali, after all, sees a noble nationalistic struggle in the we had so much to offer them […] and they swooned when he turned on the cosmopolitan charm. activities of the suicide fanatics who blew up Iraq’s had been turned away by the States. And I Askariya shrine. Naomi Klein once lamely backed thought that’s it. I have to go home and I When he returned to 1950s Quebec, Trudeau elaborated Moqtada al-Sadr as Iraq’s next national leader, while decided that nursing would be my profession. a critique of political nationalism that ultimately most brazenly of all, Edward Herman, éminence grise I was so moved by him many miles away. catapulted him to the premiership in 1968. Ironies to Noam Chomsky, saw Milosevic as the real victim abound in his intellectual development however, in the Balkans nightmare, head of a nationalist Readers who suspect a certain mawkishness here ironies which English and Cook track thoughtfully. people’s democracy struggling in a NATO half-nelson. are invited to watch the clip for themselves on the He derided Quebec nationalism as economically CBC website. This nurse’s reaction serves as a nice illiterate, culturally insecure and politically illiberal. His In the great Victorian debate that he knew well synecdoche for a career so evocatively explored by John antidote to this local nationalism was not however a between John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton, Trudeau English and Richard Cook. She captured Trudeau’s rejection of nationalist categories tout court, rather emphatically sided with Acton. Nationalism was not fondness for a certain kind of gesture-politics that so their application to the larger Canadian polity. Quebec the logical telos of organised liberalism (Trudeau’s often doubled as a well-placed knee to the groin of the nationalism could only be meaningfully defanged if understanding of Mill’s argument), it was, rather, Greatest Generation on his southern flank. In her grief, French-Canadians learned to think of Canada itself as its nemesis. Cook’s moving book noted how she exemplified his extraordinary rapport with women, the locus of their loyalty. Therefore, Canada had to be ranging from the downright classy (Kim Cattrall) to more big and Canada had to be brash. Trudeau the taunter Acton replied that national homogeneity flighty specimens like his wife Margaret Sinclair. Indeed, of ‘the nationalist brood’ in Quebec became Trudeau threatened freedom rather than nurtured it; this tribute was by no means an unworthy example of the noisy Canadian nationalist on the world stage. His multinational states, where groups counterbalanced what John Henry Newman, Trudeau’s most ethereal initial strategy in the Cold War was to pinch his nose each other, were far more likely to respect and mentor, had in mind when he appropriated the motto and yawn. Chancellor Schmidt and President Reagan promote both individual freedom and cultural cor ad cor loquitur for his cardinalational seal. In doing were incensed by his primma donna performances at pluralism. Trudeau predicted the chaos in the so, Newman affirmed his belief in those rare moments consecutive NATO summits, especially his decision modern Balkans and was deeply troubled by in modern life when a public man finds his private in the early 1970s to drastically reduce Canadian the catastrophe that was post-colonial Africa following, when, quite literally, heart speaks to heart. troops on garrison duty in Germany and to terminate throughout his career. There can be few more English’s model biography and Cook’s elegiac reflection Canada’s dual-key nuclear partnership with the US. compelling or more appalling vindications of on forty years of friendship with Trudeau provide some Trudeau’s general insight than the images inseparable clue as to why our nurse was not alone in her grief. He brought thousands of miles of the Arctic Circle from a roll call beginning with Imin and Taylor under Canadian sovereignty and extended diplomatic and ending with Mugabe and Hassan al-Bashir. Second only to Laurier and King in impact, Pierre recognition to communist China before Nixon’s Elliott Trudeau’s (1919-2000) sixteen-year premiership famous conclave with the psychopathic Chairman If Trudeau performed a spectacular pirouette so far between 1968-79 and 1980-84 remains deeply in 1972. After the Korean airline disaster in 1983, as French-Canadian nationalism was concerned, one controversial. For some, he is the architect of modern he mounted a vainglorious campaign for an end to aspect of his life that remained constant throughout Canadian political identity, one rooted in his Charter of the zero-sum rhetoric and for East-West détente. His was his intense Catholic spirituality. English’s insightful Rights and Freedoms, his multicultural domestic policies last year in office was thus stylish, provocative and and humane interrogation of Trudeau’s Catholicism and his stern insistence that Quebec’s rightful place was wholly irrelevant, his nuclear warnings as magnificent demonstrated its absolute centrality to his evolving moral spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 the Oxonian Review of Books 9

and political maturation. The nature of this relationship American constitutionalism. The heart of his political contempt for Soviet pro-democracy dissidents who got between his soul and his scholarship will undoubtedly legacy is the Charter of Rights that he attached to the in the way of an East-West deal. His cynical cackling in occupy specialists for the next few years. For all of patriated British North America Act in 1982, thereby old age about the time the Burmese junta jovially regaled his breathless womanising and bohemian instincts, entrenching key individual rights against both the him at dinner with their tactics for dealing with domestic Trudeau remained a life-long disciple of a peculiar, élite federal and provincial governments and which dissidents was only heartless when one understands strand within post-1945 Catholic ethics, the so-called empowered courts to void violative acts of parliament. that Trudeau told this story after Tiananmen Square. Personalist school of Emmanuel Mounier. Broadly, His flashy official trip to Castro’s Cuba in 1976 was a this school sought political equality by synthesising the In a country with a strong attachment to the English diplomat’s version of ‘up-yours’ aimed at a pushy US economic insights of the communist avante garde with idea of parliamentary sovereignty, Trudeau’s Charter State Department, though he had the good grace to a post-Tridentine Catholic spirituality that emphasised was as epochal a constitutional innovation as Blair’s admit when he got home that ‘El Maximo’ had taken the dignity of the individual as rooted in natural law. Human Rights Act or his proposed creation of a UK him to the cleaners over Angola. When the scale of Supreme Court. Even though he risked what one Castro’s lies about his Angolan meddling was revealed, he The great irony of this attempt to domesticate provincial premier termed ‘the break-up of the country’ promptly cancelled the lavish bilateral trade deal signed atheistic communism was, of course, the fact that in his campaign to entrench official bilingualism in in Havana. Dust in the eye, as Newman might have said. Catholicism played a major, if not actually decisive role the Constitution, Trudeau was simultaneously oddly in destroying it in the end. (Its overly long obituary was, ambivalent about US-style judicial assertion, especially Pierre Trudeau’s premiership was, in many ways, an essay after all, delivered in the mellifluous vowels of a Polish the inevitable encroachment by courts in the Charter-era in failure. The 1995 referendum in Quebec constituted Catholic who had made common cause with Reagan on areas traditionally deemed ‘political.’ His acidulated a bleak return on his passionate nationalist critiques. and Gorbachev.) Drawing on a private devotion to the attack in retirement on the Supreme Court’s Patriation Trudeau himself admitted in 1982 that his vision of a idea of Christ’s incarnation rather than His atonement, Reference verdict in 1981, a decision that forced him stringent Charter was ruined by the non-obstante clause that Trudeau the Personalist developed a theory of justice back into negotiations with the provinces and ruined allowed the provinces to override some rights in certain that put the individual at the heart of ethics and this in his plans for a stringent national bill of rights, was circumstances. He also failed to understand that the turn provided the basis for his increasingly vehement a critique of ‘judicial activism’ that might have been hag-ridden Soviet Union needed a push rather than the critique of collectivist political structures that written by the cranky ghost of Felix Frankfurter. qualified embrace he essayed in 1984. Even his Catholic undermined individual liberty at home. In the heady faith disintegrated in the end as the pitiless deity that atmosphere of the post-war French Left Bank, not unlike It has been nearly forty years since the American carried off his father when he was still a boy returned his other mentor Cardinal Newman in a bygone era, political scientist Harry Eckstein showed how Catholic in 1998 to take his youngest son in a hiking accident. Trudeau grounded his liberalism in religion, becoming and democratic institutions deeply influence each other The dreamy Personalist became an inconsolable Job, in a sense a Catholic individualist, or a papal Calvinist. in organised polities. He argued then that the more rattling around his lonely art-deco mansion in Montreal, authoritarian of the two institutions would tend to a broken elite of one so poignantly depicted by Cook. The major reforms he authorised in the Canadian Criminal Code in 1967, decriminalising homosexual acts between consenting adults as well as liberalising divorce and abortion laws, were oddly enough products of a Catholic approach to rights. That modern Catholicism has had its own emphatically liberal strands has been somewhat obscured by its obsession since 1789 with maintaining its political status and policing sexual mores. Occasionally however, liberalism and Catholicism have fused in certain respects. Chateaubriand’s critique of political tyranny was based on Catholic ideas about natural rights, as were the arguments against ‘ civil discrimination advanced by the artist James Barry at the time of the UK Act of Union in 1801.

At the death of Karol Wojtyla, the twentieth century’s very own Hildebrand, Eric Hobsbawn quite correctly lamented the passing of the last major world-historical critic of robber baron capitalism and its concomitant ‘culture of death.’ Similarly, William Brennan, America’s most dynamic Supreme Court justice after 1937, based his passionate defence of Roe on an analysis of the natural rights of the sovereign individual that clearly ‘infect’ the more open one. In this vein, Trudeau’s And yet, the stunning national reaction to his death derived from his own Irish Catholicism. (Some bishops, individualistic instincts led him to Personalism, but in 2000 suggested that in some odd way, Trudeau had obviously unamused by this lamb’s venture into the his Catholicism also left its mark on his democratic changed everything about modern Canada during his realm of jurisprudential paradox, retaliated by denying outlook. This is one way of explaining the unmistakably career. He exposed the autism that lurks at the heart him the sacraments). As far as the death penalty was authoritarian instincts in Trudeau’s intellect. He was, of certain kinds of liberalism when confronted with concerned, Brennan and Wojtyla proved that there was after all, the first Prime Minister to invoke the antique malevolent movements that masquerade as victims more to Catholic moral philosophy than the grim logic War Measures Act in peacetime, the statute he used of a wicked world. He beat Quebec nationalism in a of the Old Testament’s lex talionis. Trudeau’s social against Quebecois terrorists who kidnapped a British referendum on separation in 1980, thereby changing conscience and his critique of what he called ‘non- diplomat and murdered a provincial minister in 1970. Anglo-Canadians understanding of the country democratised global capital’ makes perfect sense in this He taunted his critics for the rest of his premiership through bilingualism and deranging the separatist intellectual context and interested parties can expect on this point and never seems to have doubted the movement for another decade. Though at his finest to read much more about this aspect of his life now propriety of using draconian legislation against during the crazy days of MAD, stagflation and Mrs that English has so deftly opened up his private papers. a relatively small, if still lethal terrorist vanguard. Thatcher’s handbags, Trudeau’s legacy still calls out to our addled world, one tormented by the hysteria There is, however, a supreme irony in Trudeau’s His wife recalled how an implacable bitterness seem to and cruelty that are the inevitable freight of political understanding of rights, in that it was essentially come over him the night the RCMP informed him of nationalism, Benedict Anderson’s complacent American. Ramsay Cook recalled that Trudeau M. Laporte’s murder. Crying at the side of their bed, he characterisations notwithstanding. To this extent, was deeply agitated by the racial violence that was warned her that he would sacrifice her and their children in the words of an English poet who would almost consuming American cities from the first few months rather than capitulate to terrorist blackmail. (The FLQ certainly have loathed the entire Trudeau brand, one of his premiership. He doubted America’s capacity to dynamos who decided to test the mettle of what they might argue that he somehow managed …to prove/ our weather these deep generational cleavages, especially saw as an inexperienced, rose wearing invertebrate almost- instinct almost true/ What will survive of us is love. in the context of its ruinous military commitment in forgot that Trudeau had preached violent revolution Indochina. And yet, for all his important criticisms during his own adolescence. English reminds us that John-Paul McCarthy, a DPhil student in history at of post-war American society, Trudeau’s premiership he knew the drill.) If Trudeau’s rationale for détente was Exeter College, Oxford, is currently writing about Gladstone’s was in many ways a billet doux to a classic kind of essentially the same as Dr Kissinger’s, then so was his intellectual life. 10 the Oxonian Review of Books spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2

Royal Shadows in the Land of Smiles Nicholas Farrelly

Paul Handley The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej Yale University Press, 2006 512 pages ISBN 0300106823

In June 2006, the 60th anniversary of King Bhumibol’s coronation brought royals from around the world to celebrate in Bangkok. While Thailand is famous for its deference to its own royalty, it was Bhutan’s Crown Prince Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck who unexpectedly stole the show. Adoring fans—most of them female—tracked his every move, smitten by his charisma and boyish good looks. Oxford-educated, and with a Buddhist kingdom of his own, Jigme became Thailand’s adopted ‘Prince Charming.’ Enquiries from Thai tourists eager to visit Bhutan have reportedly skyrocketed. Such was the love affair that when Jigme returned to Bangkok in November 2006, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Rangsit University.

Soon after, in December 2006, Jigme’s father, King subjected to great pressure to stop the publication. those that many critics attribute to, say, Tony Blair Jigme Singye Wangchuck, abdicated. The timing of They have not buckled to royalist intimidation, or to or George W. Bush. So the question remains, why this transition came as a surprise—the handover was the palace’s public relations machine. The worldwide was it Thaksinm who suffered the indignity of a originally planned for 2008. ‘Prince Charming’ became study of democratic transitions, and elite military coup while abroad, speaking at the United Nations? the King of Bhutan. It is no light burden: he has the interventions, is much better for it. Thankfully, task of leading his country from absolute monarchy careful image management does not always triumph. When the tanks rolled into Bangkok none of his to a constitutional system with a democratically elected wealth, connections or status could save Thaksin’s parliament. The Thai press has fulsomely welcomed his Other efforts to manage perceptions of Thailand mandate to rule. Six months on, the coup-makers and accession to the Bhutanese throne. In their collective have been more successful. In the days following the government they installed are well entrenched. view, a moral, handsome and fundamentally desirable the coup, the junta’s public relations efforts went Worries, however, remain about their future intentions Prince has become King. Effusive praise for this global. Through these efforts, and a sympathetic and about their ability to effectively manage the peaceful and effective transition has filtered down to the worldwide audience, there was hardly a moment when country and its troubles. The simmering Muslim Thai public. Succession is on many of their minds, too. Thailand’s carefully cultivated image of tranquillity insurgency in Thailand’s southernmost border and hospitality was questioned. The coup was widely provinces and a stagnating economy remain major Every monarchy inevitably confronts the issue of acclaimed as a bloodless intervention to remove the concerns. In response, the generals, and especially succession at the end of a long reign. Just as Britain’s divisive Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. The junta-installed Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont, Prince Charles has waited in his mother’s shadow, generals seized full control and Thaksin, the three- talk of ‘sufficiency economy.’ This vague conception Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej has been on the times elected telecommunications tycoon-cum- of simplicity and sustainability is muddied by its own throne for so many decades that speculation about maverick Prime Minister, was stranded at the United self-satisfaction and ambiguity. It is, most importantly, the monarchy’s future has fermented for far longer Nations in New York. Grumbles from some Western the brainchild of King Bhumibol and his advisors. than usual. In this time, Thai Crown Prince Maha governments, and consternation from a handful of Inside the Kingdom, its tenets are above reproach. Vajiralongkorn, a middle-aged military-man with a academic doubters, did nothing to tarnish the coup- reputation for haughtiness and womanising, has largely makers’ positive glow. Pictures of dazzled tourists During Thailand’s financial crisis in the late 1990s, failed to endear himself to his subjects. His image is posing in front of tanks alongside smiling soldiers Bhumibol used his personal cachet and finely not helped by the forces that hide the role of the palace graced the pages of newspapers around the world. honed image as national saviour to promote in elite life. The politics of monarchy in Thailand his own vision of national social and economic are secretive and, at times, tinged with violence, Many in Thailand and elsewhere, in fact, breathed a development. Sometimes called ‘the new theory,’ providing a stark contrast to the smiling, happy-go- sigh of relief after months of unremitting tension. it is built around a conception of rustic self-sufficiency: lucky image that Thailand tries to present to the world. The world was relieved by Thailand’s civilised coup; ‘enough to live on and enough to eat.’ Oddly, its what else could be expected from a land of smiling proponents use the same language that has made Bhutan’s That image of Southeast Asia’s ‘Land of Smiles’ people? We were told that there was no bloodshed ‘Gross National Happiness’ a famous countercultural was most recently tested in September 2006 when a —just a handful of arrests and no real reason to exoticism. Anybody who has recently passed through group of generals staged an overnight coup. Every get concerned. The generals went on television and Bangkok will see the immediate disjuncture between observer wanted to know: would this ‘intervention’ proclaimed that it was business as usual. They smiled modern Thailand and this royal ideology. As one mark a return to the bad old days of cyclical coups and posed for pictures. The King, a man who has illustration, the newest mega-mall, the ostentatious and counter-coups? Thailand has experienced learned a thing or two about coups during his 60- £230 million Siam Paragon in central Bangkok, is seventeen coups since the Second World War and year reign, was also snapped consulting with the even built on land leased from the Crown Property before 2006 the last was in 1992. Since the late 1990s, coup-makers. Many took this as a sign that the King Bureau. Regardless of the many contradictions, before many had assumed that everything (the constitution, endorsed his generals and their well-timed intervention. the coup the theory of ‘sufficiency economy’ was of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law) had been largely academic interest. It was rhetorically significant settled once and for all. The feeling, then, was that The generals cancelled the elections that were but lacked any serious grounding in government policy. the soldiers were back in the barracks for good and scheduled for October and Thaksin was forced to Now with a royally-aligned, palace-supported military that Bhumibol had finally helped install sustainable decamp to London’s poshest neighbourhoods. Many leadership in charge, the implementation of the democratic traditions. That consensus was wrong. Thais cheered his ousting, particularly in Bangkok. King’s economic ideas has full government backing. The urban middle-class had grown weary of what they Anybody hoping to confirm just how wrong that saw as the immorality, corruption and violence of his One reason there is little public criticism of the King’s consensus had become must read Paul Handley’s The ‘regime.’ Under Thaksin there were many problems theory is because questioning the King, or anybody King Never Smiles. It traces the life of Thailand’s King including nefarious commercial dealings, accusations aligned with the monarchy is not merely dangerous but in an unprecedented and critical attempt to understand of corruption and megalomania, and the bloody 2003 illegal in Thailand. Foreigners are not immune to charges the political and social role of the monarchy. At the ‘War on Drugs.’ Nonetheless, criticisms of Thaksin of lèse majesté. A Frenchman was arrested in 1995 in a same time, it shines light on the dark spaces surrounding failed to dent his unprecedented electoral success and bizarre confrontation on a Thai Airways flight when he the Thai royalist and politico-military elite. This is his political opponents were so neutered that they was accused of making a derogatory comment about uncertain and potentially dangerous terrain. Yale were forced to boycott the most recent election. a Thai princess. In two very different incidents, a spat University Press and Handley himself have been The problems of Thaksin’s rule were no worse than in 2002 saw two prominent Far Eastern Economic Review spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 the Oxonian Review of Books 11

journalists accused of lèse majesté, and in 2007 a Swiss of a tightly controlled political machine. According book about the man at the heart of this modern story man was arrested and threatened with 75 years in jail for to Handley, when he became King, ‘Bhumibol left of royal power and success is remarkable. Under such allegedly defacing images of the King. When foreigners behind his European-bred modernist persona to guide difficult circumstances, and with imperfect access, it are not involved, charges of being ‘against the King’ his kingdom in the millennium-old tradition of the is hardly surprising that the The King Never Smiles has are often deployed to silence opponents in political dhammaraja, the selfless king who rules by the Buddhist some flaws or that it has weathered much criticism. disputes. Former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra code of dhamma.’ Drawing on the legitimacy of old Nonetheless, for many people it is a confronting and and his sparring partner, media entrepreneur Sondhi royal patterns, Bhumibol has been cultivated as a figure difficult book. Many are seemingly unwilling to approach Limthongkul, both used this tactic during their 2005- of adoration. And adored he is. For many months every it with an open mind, read the book thoroughly and 2006 showdowns over the country’s political future. year, towns and cities across Thailand are festooned digest its analysis. To some, its uncensored version Neither side could claim the full endorsement of the with banners, lights and installations marking the King’s of events and personalities bears little relationship King: the resulting stalemate was only broken by the coup. achievements and royal milestones. Handley gives a to the royal biography with which they are familiar. good example of this cult of Bhumibol. He writes Such restrictions on public commentary are especially that ‘when in December 1997 the palace revealed that But the numerous reviews of this wide-ranging relevant to my discussion because the recent book by the king had set a world record for university degrees, biography are generally very positive. The most critical veteran journalist, Paul Handley, directly confronts afterward Kasetsart University tossed off all restraint review, by Hong Kong based anthropologist Grant the Thai use of lèse majesté. Handley’s tome is banned and awarded him ten honorary doctorates at once.’ Evans, drew a reply from Handley himself. Handley in Thailand and the Yale University Press website retaliated that Evans’s review was ‘strikingly similar advertising its publication has been intermittently While Bhumibol has amassed honours at home to the Thai palace and government’s official view of blocked in the Kingdom. Observers widely agree that and abroad, his son and heir, Crown Prince Maha my book, designed to convince people to dismiss it by writing this unauthorised biography of Bhumibol, Vajiralongkorn, has not always matched popular without reading it.’ Other reviewers—anthropologist Handley may never be allowed back to Thailand. expectations of royal stock. Handley argues that Andrew Walker, political scientist Duncan McCargo, from very early on ‘Bhumibol certainly understood author Ian Buruma and prolific Bangkok-based pundit Handley’s The King Never Smiles is one of the very rare that Vajiralongkorn was a problem.’ It is with the Chris Baker—have given the book strong, positive books about Southeast Asia that has actually motivated prince that the monarchy’s future is most tested. reviews. Duncan McCargo’s effort for New Left Review a wide-ranging discussion, particularly outside Thailand. His sister, the popular and well-loved Princess puts it best when he describes the book and its credible, Months after its first release, the book continues to be Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, would be many Thais’ first Thai-speaking author as ‘the worst nightmare of the reviewed and debated. Curiously, there are many who choice but, over the years, her elevation ahead of guardians of the Chakri dynasty.’ McCargo argues claim to have not read the book but yet still feel aggrieved Vajiralonkorn has remained problematic. According that from the palace’s perspective ‘Handley’s moves by its publication. Those who dismiss the book tend to to Handley, ‘Bhumibol’s most fundamental failing to undermine decades of propaganda and mystique do so on the grounds that it is virulently anti-monarchy is the Achilles’ heel of every monarchy; he has surrounding the royal institution border on sacrilege.’ or, even more simplistically, anti-Thai. Handley’s book been unable to guarantee an orderly succession to is, on the contrary, simply the best introduction for a wise, selfless, and munificent king like himself.’ The great strength of The King Never Smiles is that anybody hoping to understand the ongoing tensions Handley is not blind to the robust network of people racking the Thai body politic. It is the story of the royal Such an ‘orderly succession’ has occurred in Bhutan around Bhumibol who have developed his public network—what political scientist Duncan McCargo and Handley does not discount that it will eventually persona and shielded him from criticism. What has recently dubbed ‘network monarchy’—and the happen in Thailand. Handley concludes that for its should already be clear is that this book should be ongoing cultivation of the throne’s matrix of power. very survival, ‘ultimately, members of the royal family read by anybody serious about studying democratic will have to make use of one of the monarchy’s transitions and, in particular, the way that Thailand has It is obviously a controversial and complex story. greatest unspoken prerogatives: the alchemic ability struggled to reconcile ancient and modern institutions. Handley begins by noting that Bhumibol is the only and right to remake itself before others do it.’ In In this context, those who continue to ignore the King to have ever been born in the United States. this context, can Vajiralongkorn reform perceptions political role of Thailand’s King, and his backers, are Raised mainly outside Thailand, he was educated of his character and behaviour? Could he be made naïve and short-sighted. That Bhumibol supported in Europe as the second son of Prince Mahidol over in the model of Bhutan’s ‘Prince Charming’? the coup to thwart Thaksin’s parallel power structure Adulyadej. Bhumibol’s older brother, Ananda Mahidol, Handley shows that remaking the monarchy is the is, in the judgement of the best informed observers, was made a boy-King in 1935 but, even before he was only way that the institution has survived since the beyond doubt. But many questions remain about the formally crowned, was found shot dead in mysterious potential of any future sovereign to assert a similarly circumstances in 1946. The details of that death strong political role. Handley’s story of royalty in remain hazy. Handley explains the various theories Thailand does not echo the Bhutanese Himalayan and concludes that any of the remaining evidence is fairytale. Instead, The King Never Smiles provides inadequate proof. A hasty cover-up ensured that few, unprecedented access to the hard fought battles that if any, real answers may ever emerge. Handley writes have come and gone in Bangkok’s sweltering heat. that in the immediate aftermath, Bhumibol, ‘the bright, often smiling and joking prince…[was] named Thailand now drifts along without even an emerging king of a country in which he had spent less than 5 democratic tradition. Recent events show that the King of his 18 years.’ According to Handley, the new King and his generals are more than willing to displace elected ‘would almost never be seen smiling in public again.’ representatives at their whim. Will Bhumibol’s legacy be the renewed assertion of royal prerogatives and Bhumibol assumed a weakened throne during a time extra-democratic intervention? As a strong and much of dictators, geo-political intrigue and, of course, loved monarch, Bhumibol has managed the potential sporadic military coups. Handley argues that ‘ever fallout from this ongoing political role by drawing on since the day his brother mysteriously died, he seemed reservoirs of popular goodwill and patience. Future never to be seen smiling, instead displaying an apparent Kings (or Queens) may not be so indulged. And, most penitential pleasurelessness in the trappings and importantly, there is no guarantee that Bhumibol has burdens of the throne.’ In Handley’s account, we learn arranged ‘an orderly succession to a wise, selfless, and a great deal about the triumphs and tribulations of this munificent king like himself.’ Bhutan provides the enigmatic and private man, struggling with the public contrast. As Jigme’s sun rises in the high Himalaya, machinations of over 60 years as King. In his analysis Bhumibol’s shadow only gets longer in Thailand. His Handley is often forced to rely on rumours to support long and fruitful reign is coming to an end; but in these, his points, a product of circumstance rather than its final years, it has become a reign of uncertainty. choice. Such is the tight control exercised by the Palace For the moment, the people of the ‘Land of Smiles’ that most information about the dynamics of palace find themselves staring at new and unwanted strife. power can be conveniently dismissed as mere ‘rumour.’ founding of the Chakri dynasty in 1782. Through countless political ructions, not to mention the Nicholas Farrelly is an MPhil student in development studies In Thailand the whispered rumours are many but they overthrow of absolute monarchy in 1932, the Thai at Balliol College, Oxford, and an editor of The Oxonian are not the full story of Bhumibol or his reign. Handley’s royal family has not only survived—it has prospered. Review of Books. He is co-founder of the New Mandala account offers an unusually nuanced interpretation That Handley’s contribution is the first independent website, a daily source of information on Southeast Asian affairs. 12 the Oxonian Review of Books spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 Herzog’s Wilderness Alex Nemser

Rescue Dawn explorers. When finally Aguirre asks ferociously, ‘Who into the ears, or of a sketch made of something seen Written and Directed by else is with me?’, everyone else is either dead, shot out of a train window during a long ride. When asked Warner Herzog with poison darts or swallowed by the jungle, and the whether his films consistently address certain themes, Gibralter Entertainment, 2006 makeshift raft is overrun with monkeys—the last and Herzog has answered, ‘Though I cannot be sure of 126 minutes only subjects of an empire whose rise and fall took this, I do know one thing. Let’s say you turn on the place in the confines of one man’s head. Other films television and see ten seconds of a film. You would depict, for example, a man orchestrating the hauling immediately know that this must be one of my films.’ The first picture in The Past From Above, a recent of a 340-tonne ship over a mountain to make possible exhibition of aerial photographs at the British a concert with the virtuoso tenor Caruso, an engineer Herzog’s work can be divided loosely into three Museum depicting the world’s ancient monuments, setting out to build a ghostlike airship to fly just a few categories: first, fictional dramas set in various historical shows the supposed birthplace of mankind, the feet above the rainforest, and a group of astronauts periods and often in remote locations (Aguirre, ‘cradle of humanity’ in South Africa. The ground is travelling to colonise a blue planet in the Andromeda Fitzcarraldo (1982), or 1984’s The Enigma of Kaspar parched, torn up with cracks and dotted only with galaxy for fear of a catastrophe on earth. Their wild Hauser); second, ‘documentaries’ that often relate an small trees whipped with dust; there is nowhere to hope may be simply to survive, as in Rescue Dawn or account of an extraordinary but unknown figure or hide from the sun and any water must lie far beneath Wings of Hope (2000), in which a woman describes story (Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), My Best Fiend the earth. Nothing, it seems, was meant to live here. walking through the Peruvian jungle for twelve days (1999), or Grizzly Man in 2005); third, films that blur Yet, from this region humans emerged, and, as the after a plane crash in which she was the only survivor. the previous categories by splicing together images exhibition illustrates, went on to carve ecstatic figures both fictional and non-fictional, or by using voiceovers into this same ground, to dig holes in it big enough As a filmmaker, Herzog is interested in addressing the to present documentary footage in a fictional, narrative to hold entire churches, and to erect on it ziggurats, extremes of experience, telling stories in which someone form (Fata Morgana (1971), Lessons of Darkness (1992), towers, and temples that still stand. That human life comes face to face with isolation, the threat of failure, 2005’s The Wild Blue Yonder). These distinctions may should find itself surrounded by a natural world that or oblivion. Like Walter Benjamin’s storyteller, Herzog be muddied even further when one considers that in is so completely indifferent and even inhospitable to it, has ‘borrowed his authority from Death,’ that is, he the so-called documentaries, Herzog has shaped the and that at the same time such a world should inspire has sought out instances in which an abyss opened up material considerably more than is normally expected humans to search relentlessly for meaning and to strive and he has gone to see what might be found there. In of a nonfiction filmmaker. Frequently, for instance, relentlessly for unthinkable achievement, is an irony many cases, he has even wrested his authority from he invents and films dreams that are then attributed that lies at the heart of the films of Werner Herzog. Death as one wrests a throne from a tyrannical king. to the central character, as in the sequence in Little Thus while cutting a film in Munich, Herzog heard Dieter in which Dieter Dengler walks through an Rescue Dawn, Herzog’s latest film and his largest project on the radio that a volcano had a 100 percent chance airfield surrounded by thousands of planes. Herzog in years, illustrates Herzog’s lifelong fascination with, in of erupting in Guadaloupe and that one farmer who calls this approach an attempt at presenting an ‘ecstatic the words of Conrad’s Marlowe, ‘all that mysterious life lived on the slope had refused to evacuate; that same truth,’ a truth beyond a collection of facts, which of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, afternoon, he and his cameraman flew to the site to could only be achieved intuitively and metaphorically. in the hearts of wild men.’ The film is a fictional shoot an interview with the farmer and the rest of the reconstruction of Herzog’s earlier documentary footage that became the film La Soufrière (1977). In Herzog thus represents the rare case of a filmmaker Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), which tells the story the end, the volcano never erupted. ‘We treated it with who deals predominantly in metaphor, rather than in of a German American pilot’s escape from captivity great disrespect,’ Herzog said in an interview, ‘Jörg [the simile. In Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), for through the jungle in Laos during the Vietnam War. In cameraman] and I walked all they way up to the crater example, there is an extended sequence in which the this story can be seen the central conceit of Herzog’s and pissed in it. The matter of fear doesn’t come up. characters are shown hunting rabbits on a country estate. films: an encounter between an extraordinary human Nobody else could have made the film, and somebody In the context of plot, by placing the hunting scenes being and the wilderness. For Herzog, this seems had to. I suppose you will realise from this that in between scenes of dialogue and romantic intrigue, we to be the basic structure for all human life since some way I must have resolved the death question.’ take the hunting as a sort of reflective comment on the action: ‘The amorous pursuits of the people of various classes on this country estate are in some way like the activity of hunting rabbits.’ Herzog’s films, however, seem to represent a body of metaphors, in which the subject has been lost, hidden, or severed. They give the viewer only the second part of the structure. Thus, rather than declare ‘My love is a flower,’ Herzog’s films seem to say, ‘[Blank] is a procession up a mountain at the top of which Death is waiting,’ as in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, or ‘[Blank] is a town where the secret to creating a beautiful type of red glass has been lost,’ as in Heart of Glass (1976). The viewer feels profoundly that he or she has just come across a metaphor but finds it impossible to pin down what it was a metaphor for. Much of the power of the films is accordingly derived from the viewer’s sense of having encountered the absence of a closed circuit of meaning. Thus the films often feel not only like études, but additionally like preludes to works that were never made, like offhand gestures in the direction of a complete significance. In this way, Herzog’s use of metaphor is close to that of Kafka, in whose works the accounts of the Chrisian Bale in Rescue Dawn protagonists are felt by the reader to be haunted by the open-ended mystery of the metaphor’s other half. the Fall of Man. The films are filled with characters Herzog is very prolific—in forty-five years he has made who, beguiled by a vision or dream or captivated over forty-five films—and this is due, in part, to a kind Rather than resembling a prophet, as he has often been by an imagined possibility, set out to accomplish a of restless turning-over of the mind that has evidently called, Herzog brings to mind a traveller who, returning feat that would charge their lives with significance. recognized itself in some far corner of the earth and from a venture into a forgotten or forbidden country, its history. He has, in other words, a manifest knack presents us with a suitcase full of snapshots. These In Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), one of Herzog’s for seizing upon stories that seem destined from the images remain with us, in the words of the poet Sandor most famous films, a sixteenth-century conquistador start to become films by Werner Herzog. His process Weores, ‘half-remembered now / and later, like a dream. announces a rebellion against Philip II, King of Spain, is extremely professional and rapid: often he will write / And with a taste of eternity / this side of the tomb.’ and claims for himself the whole of South America, a screenplay in three days and complete an entire film leading a doomed expedition down the Peruvian in thirty, moving on immediately to the next project. Alex Nemser is an MPhil student in European literature at Amazon in search of El Dorado, a fictitious city Accordingly, many of his films have the quality of an New College, Oxford. His poems have been published in The of gold invented by the native inhabitants to trick étude composed when a faint melody floated suddenly Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times. spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 the Oxonian Review of Books 13 So Much For the Past Tom Walker

Louis MacNeice Throughout the second half of the thirties MacNeice a collected edition in 1949 he dismantled the order Collected Poems (edited by Peter McDonald) published a large quantity of work, ranging from and shape of the original collections. In particular, Faber and Faber, 2007 Letters from Iceland (1937), the wonderfully high-spirited he disastrously separated out the longer poems into 866 pages ISBN: 0571215742 unorthodox travel book written in collaboration with separate sections. The editor of the 1966 posthumous Auden, to Autumn Journal (1939), a series of poems of the moment in which the slow fall of Spain to fascism and the shameful 1938 Munich settlement are viewed through the filter of everyday life—the political and the personal, the living and the literary resolutely In response to news of Poland’s invasion and the intermingled. There is a refusal to put to one side arrival of war, W. H. Auden condemned the thirties philosophical truths for the sake of ideological dreams; as ‘a low dishonest decade.’ Auden was born 100 years but space is also found for other, more intimate ago this year and is rightly lauded as a great poet; truths, such as the joy in the pain felt at love’s passing: but so too was his friend Louis MacNeice, whose own centenary is being marked by the publication September has come, it is hers of a much-needed new Collected Poems, edited by the Whose vitality leaps in the autumn, Northern Irish poet and academic Peter McDonald. Whose nature prefers Collected Poems, MacNeice’s mentor and friend, the Auden’s arrival in the United States in 1939 prompted Trees without leaves and a fire in the fire-place; classical scholar E. R. Dodds, respected the poet’s him to reconsider his commitment to political issues, So I give her this month and the next earlier editorial decisions, turning the edition into a and he went on to revise and suppress those of his Though the whole of my year should be hers book of two halves: the reordered and revised poems past works that had hinted at his involvement in left- who has rendered already for the 1949 Collected, followed by a compilation of the wing, near-Marxist politics. MacNeice, meanwhile, So many of its days intolerable or perplexed later volumes, all in their original arrangements. As found himself in Ireland at the outbreak of the war. But so many more so happy; Peter McDonald points out, this was not in MacNeice’s He had also been in America earlier that year and he Who has left a scent on my life and left my walls best literary interests, and McDonald’s edition has returned there, working as a guest-lecturer at Cornell Dancing over and over with her shadow, pursued a more reader-friendly compromise. He places and worrying over where his future lay. Rather than Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls the poetry in groupings that correspond closely to dramatically renouncing his past and staying in America, And all of London littered with remembered the individual collections published, while respecting though, MacNeice went back to Britain at the end of kisses. MacNeice’s revisions and omissions of individual 1940, having thought deeply about the value of poetry. poems. The omissions appear in an appendix, together Part of MacNeice’s wariness of opinion petrifying into with the immature first volume Blind Fireworks and Often thought of as a ‘thirties poet’ who, along violent conviction stemmed from his relationship with various other previously uncollected pieces, so that with Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day-Lewis, Ireland. On reading the memoirs of W. B. Yeats’s muse, the impact and artistry, the verve and integrity of his was caricatured by Roy Campbell as ‘MacSpaunday’, the revolutionary Maud Gonne, in another section of poetry from 1935 to 1945 is once again apparent. MacNeice was actually a late arrival on the decade’s Autumn Journal, he notes how ‘a single purpose can be literary scene and something of an outsider. Born in founded on/ A jumble of opposites’ and ironically No edition, however, can hide the creative decline Belfast and brought up in nearby Carrickfergus, his envies the ‘intransigence’ of his ‘Countrymen who MacNeice suffered after the war, when the demands father was a home-ruler clergyman and later bishop in the shoot to kill and never/ See the victim’s face become placed on him at the BBC and the hard drinking Church of Ireland. After the early death of his mother, their own/ Or find his motive sabotage their motives.’ culture he found there seem to have taken their toll. MacNeice was educated in England, at Marlborough Yet it was to Yeats, a central presence in his poetry, that The long poems in Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) and and Oxford, where he took a First in Classics. His debut MacNeice turned as war came, in his sympathetic 1941 Autumn Sequel (1954)—the uncomfortable unequal of collection, Blind Fireworks, was published in 1929 when study, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats. MacNeice saw that ‘if its precursor—are dispiriting. The craft and facility he was still at university, but it sank without trace. And the war made nonsense of Yeats’s poetry and of all are still present, but almost now a liability; the verse he had to wait until 1935 before his second volume, works that are called “escapist”, it also made nonsense is slick yet stale, searching for something meaningful Poems, was published. By that time, the other three of the poetry that professes to be “realist”.’ According to say. As MacNeice himself put it: ‘Do I prefer to legs of MacSpaunday had several collections in print to MacNeice, the thirties had put too much emphasis forget it? This middle stretch/ Of life is bad for poets.’ and were publicly embroiled in the politics of the day. on utility in life and art, neglecting the question of value. Food may be ‘useful for life,’ he mused, ‘but what is life But without these years of despair we might never Striking an authentically disillusioned tone useful for? To both the question of pleasure and the have had MacNeice’s extraordinary late renaissance. throughout—rather than the illusioned-disillusionment question of value the utilitarian has no answer. The faith Turning his back on the long poem, he published of the faux-revolutionary—MacNeice’s volume probes in the value of living is a mystical faith. The pleasure three volumes of lyrics in seven years, each better than its images and tests its assumptions with scrupulous in bathing or dancing, in colour or shape, is a mystical the last, culminating in The Burning Perch—surely one honesty. ‘Snow’ registers the shock of snow starting experience. If non-utilitarian activity is abnormal, then of the twentieth century’s most powerful collections. to fall, revealing an unbridgeable gap between all men are abnormal.’ MacNeice’s poetry during the It was published in 1963, ten days after his death at itself and the roses sitting in front of the window: war, when he started to work as a writer and radio the age of 56. In many ways MacNeice had seemed producer for the BBC, incorporates a related visionary to be making a new start: he had found love, wrestled The room was suddenly rich and the great bay- aspect. Underpinned by a mystical faith in the value of himself free from the BBC, moved out of London and window was living, MacNeice can strike a note of defiance in the was at the height of his creative powers. Yet the spectre Spawning snow and pink roses against it face of the bombing of London, as in ‘Brother Fire’: of death prophetically hangs over these concentrated, Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: technically innovative poems. They are, as MacNeice World is suddener than we fancy it. When our brother Fire was having his dog’s day puts it, ‘two-way affairs,’ ‘the grim elements mixed with Jumping the London streets with millions of tin others’, such as in the haunting, love-filled final ‘Coda’: But this is not just a philosophical epiphany. It extends cans Clanking at his tail, we heard some shadow the volume’s earlier warning in ‘To a Communist,’ taking say ‘Give the dog a bone’ – and so we gave him Maybe we knew each other better up and ironically reconfiguring the image of snow as not ours; Night after night we watched him slaver When the night was young and unrepeated just a dangerous obscurer of the world’s complications, and crunch away The beams of human life, the And the moon stood still over Jericho. but also as a disquietingly distinct part of its plurality: top of topless towers […] So much for the past; in the present Your thoughts make shape like snow; in one night Did we not on those mornings after the All Clear, There are moments caught between heart-beats only When you were looting shops in elemental joy When maybe we know each other better. The gawky earth grows breasts, And singing as you swarmed up city block and spire, Snow’s unity engrosses Echo your thoughts in ours? ‘Destroy! Destroy!’ But what is that clinking in the darkness? Particular pettiness of stones and grasses. Maybe we shall know each other better But before you proclaim the millennium, my dear, One of the great achievements of Peter McDonald’s When the tunnels meet beneath the mountain. Consult the barometer – new edition is that it allows the reader to see more This poise is perfect but maintained clearly the strength of MacNeice’s poetry through For one day only. the thirties and the war. MacNeice revised his work, Tom Walker is a DPhil student in English literature at Lincoln albeit lightly, throughout his life, and in preparing College, Oxford, writing a thesis on twentieth-century Irish poetry. 14 the Oxonian Review of Books spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 Putting America Back Together Sam O’Leary

Ronald Dworkin apparent contradictions between his two great works. based jurisprudence more characteristic of Ronald Is Democracy Possible Here? The seven virtues McCloskey sees as characteristic of Dworkin. Attempting to realign Aristotle, Aquinas, and Princeton University Press, 2006 the Western bourgeois tradition are hope, faith, and love Smith with her own anti-foundationalism, she suggests 192 pages (and the reader might well begin to get worried when she that we may not know much about reality but what ISBN 0691126534 reads the description of these as the ‘Christian’ virtues, we do know is moral and ethical; it is ‘ought’ not ‘is.’ ‘appropriate to a believer in Our Lord and Saviour,’ but Yet pages later she rejects the universalism of Kantian Deidre McCloskey more on that soon) along with the ‘pagan’ virtues of morality, suggesting that ‘ethics is a local narrative.’ The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce University of Chicago Press, 2006 courage, temperance, justice, and prudence. One is 634 pages never quite convinced that there is something quite as Dworkin’s rendition of a richer view of democracy is ISBN 0226556638 special about these seven as the author would have it. also concerned with ethical narratives at both the local Andrè Comte-Sponville’s A Short Treatise on the Great level and the universal. His complaint is that without Virtues listed eighteen and one might well wonder why agreed foundations, discussions about what ought to be McCloskey deems politeness not to be a bourgeois trait done have no basis for resolution. Those whose personal or compassion an unimportant constraint on behaviour. moral insights lead them to conclusions different When Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Nevertheless, the book contains a rich and fascinating from others’ can do little more than butt heads with Sentiments in 1759 and The Wealth of Nations in 1776, account of the way these virtues have grown in an increasing force, exacerbating the widening division in he viewed democracy simply as an ancient Grecian integrated way within the middle class capitalist tradition American political life. Furthermore, the United States experiment that had ended with the Peloponnesian Wars. in the Netherlands and England and then in the rest of are untied along relatively stark regional lines. Much He was thus pessimistic about the radical resurgence Europe, North America and Australasia. Furthermore, like Oliver Wendell Holmes in the aftermath of the of democracy in the United States, believing that it the message of balance and equilibrium is persuasive. Civil War, Dworkin looks aghast upon this division. would only lead to rancorous factions fighting among Capitalism is corrupted by the ‘prudence only’ school But unlike Holmes’s pragmatist Metaphysical Club, themselves. Smith predicted that if the American and nobody is more to blame than McCloskey’s Dworkin seeks to lay a groundwork of values upon revolutionaries did achieve their desired independence, Chicago School economist colleagues. Individuals which genuine democratic discussion might be built. these factions would tear the country apart in ‘open should act in pursuit of profit and in their own self- violence and bloodshed.’ It was nearly a century before interest but also in an ethical way. Her richer view of Dworkin sets out two principles that he believes almost his prediction was realised in the Civil War of 1861-65. capitalist life is perhaps the book’s most attractive story. all Americans can agree upon. First, that each human life is intrinsically and equally valuable and secondly, that America’s public intellectuals have been fascinated by The other side of the coin is the idealised vision of each person has an inalienable personal responsibility factions and fissures within their republic, but conflict dismantling state regulation, which McCloskey sees for identifying and realising value in his or her own over the past two decades has reached a bitterness as permissible (and desirable) once human actions are life. These are fleshed-out versions of the principles not seen since Reconstruction. The ‘culture wars’ constrained by personal morality and the balancing of of equality and liberty—principles that Dworkin have led political theorists and commentators alike to the virtues. This libertarian agenda is McCloskey’s real believes can be made to work against each other but lament the division of America into ‘red’ states and pursuit and, once one realises this, a lot of the rich and do not need to. In fact, while it is easy to make policies ‘blue’, often shorthand for a conflict between religious fascinating accounts of intellectual and cultural history that conform to one or the other, by aiming to find conservatives and secular liberals. Of late, the division seem somewhat beside the point. In fact, McCloskey’s solutions to arguments based on the extent to which seems to many so wide and so deep as to have broken work is clogged with an overwhelming pile of proposed answers conform to both these principles down any possibility of engagement between the references and footnotes that pit the reader, in moments we are offered grounds for democratic discussion and differing ethical, religious and economic positions. of doubt, against her assembled army of learned government. If we agree on basic principles then our authorities. This academic legerdemain is bombastic and, conversations have some basis for preferring one view Ronald Dworkin’s Is Democracy Possible Here? is aimed one senses, deliberately intimidating. But her style is to another beyond personal insight or taste. Democracy, at a wider audience than much of his previous work at the same time so charming and so self-aware that then, returns legitimately to conversationalist ideals with the hope of bridging this gap and renewing she may be forgiven some of her grandiloquence. rather than simply relying on electoral success American democracy in the form of a principled to obliterate the views of one side or the other. conversation. From a very different tradition, the Chicago economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has In the second half of the book, Dworkin considers also recently initiated a project that she hopes will how these shared values might inform the debates provide new possibilities for understanding amongst on which there is fiercest disagreement: torture and American citizens, intellectuals and politicians. Her human rights in light of terrorist threats, the role of book, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce religion in public life, and taxation and governmental attempts to reintegrate Aristotle, Aquinas, and a fuller legitimacy. He drills down to a more specific level as reading of Adam Smith into American capitalism. Both Deeper problems lie in her blindness to the well, especially in the chapter on religion, where he use the language of ‘red’ states and ‘blue’: McCloskey often-devastating externalities of commerce and considers the teaching of creationism in schools, the professing to speak to the blue states on behalf of the her failure to address the difficulty of behaving religious overtones of the Pledge of Allegiance and the red and Dworkin espousing conclusions that he admits morally in an integrated mannerand the ensuing possibility of state-sanctioned gay marriage. Throughout ‘will strike readers as … a very deep shade of blue.’ logic of disembodied expertise that many number the book, though he endeavours to build a case for among the fatal flaws in American capitalism. his opponents, he concludes that it is the traditional McCloskey’s massive 616-page tome is exhausting, liberal position on each issue that is most faithful to inspiring, intriguing, and infuriating, which is pretty Even more problematic is McCloskey’s conviction the two greater ideals. Further, he suggests that a much as she wants it to be. Her mission is to show that a virtuous life is imperfect without religious faith major problem for democratic discourse is that many that the bourgeois capitalist tradition was built on in the transcendental. She sells the benefits of her Americans treat their politics as a matter of allegiance a far more sophisticated ethical platform than the Episcopalian brand of Christianity whilst emphasising rather than reason, intellectually compartmentalising utilitarian model that sees prudence as the sole the universal religious and secular insights found therein. contradictory ideas. So, they embrace values about the appropriate basis for action, both at the personal level And she causes further confusion as she stresses the importance of human life and then vote for politicians and at the institutional/governmental level. Markets objective nature of this transcendence whilst appealing who promise to cut social welfare programs. Or they not only make us richer but make us better people. In everywhere to the pragmatist tradition of personal insist on the importance of personal responsibility particular, the bourgeois synthesis of pagan, Christian moral solutions to local and relative circumstances. for religious faith whilst condemning any politician and aristocratic virtues have enabled capitalism to who does not promise to create a Christian America. flourish, but capitalism has also allowed that synthesis This muddled blend of realism and pragmatism, of Is democracy possible? Dworkin is optimistic, to succeed. McCloskey rejects capitalist-allied virtue ethics and situational ethics, is a serious weakness. even if he fears such optimism may be perverse. intellectuals like Ricardo, Rand, Friedman and Becker McCloskey claims that there is no normative code here, for their failure to define commercial society by any simply a set of virtues that the individual must balance Much of Dworkin’s political theory is contained in standard higher than greed. She suggests that the true according to circumstances. But pragmatists such as far greater depth elsewhere. In stark contrast to The ethical tradition of capitalism stretches from Aristotle Richard Posner and Oliver Wendell Holmes are left out Bourgeois Virtues, his book is slim and accessible. And through Aquinas to Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Keynes, of the camp because of the utilitarian way in which they while those who wish to really grapple with his work Aron and Hirschman (and, of course, McCloskey). judge even such things as forced sterilisation, rape, and at the theoretical level will want to go beyond these The realignment of Smith into that tradition is slavery. This is not good enough for McCloskey, and she central to the book and attempts to reconcile the is forced to appeal not only to Kant but also to a rights- continued on poage 15 spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 the Oxonian Review of Books 15 Christopher Hitchens: Citizen-Critic Aaron MacLean

Christopher Hitchens faith the place in politics that it had once meaningfully to wage the fight against populist rightwingery within God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything had in Europe, and which it constitutionally retains the polity, as well as without. Those who consider Twelve, 2007 to this day (see, for reference, the Queen and the this contradictory would do well to shine a little 320 pages Church of England). Colmes, we presume, was just light, or even a little heat, on their own assumptions. ISBN: 0446579807 hoping no one would strike him in the confusion. Aaron MacLean is also an American citizen. From 2003 to The symbolism of Hitchens taking his oath at Jefferson’s 2006 he was a Marshall Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. lovely memorial on the National Mall was no accident. His work has appeared in The Weekly Standard and The eorge MacDonald Fraser, in his imperishable G Hitchens’ politics mirror closely those of America’s third American. classic Flashman’s Lady, has his hero remark of old president, and his style of political discourse does as well. Solomon Haslam, the English public schoolboy For both men, the rhetoric comes hot, and in the heat turned Borneo pirate who starts having second sometimes the light doesn’t shine as far as it otherwise Subscribe to thoughts after he kidnaps Flashman and his wife: might. Being originally English, Hitchens suffers (and, The Oxonian Review of Books But what was he to do now? Unless he chopped though born Virginian, Jefferson does as well) from the severe restriction that he sometimes mistakes being us both (which seemed far-fetched, pirate and Within the UK: Old Etonian though he was) it seemed to me he clever for being wise. We Americans, not being very had no choice but to set us free with apologies, clever as a nation, are nonetheless greatly impressed. and sail away, grief-stricken, to join the foreign Individuals In politics, it’s results that matter, not philosophy, and legion, or become a monk, or an American citizen. 1 year (3 issues) - £11 a flamethrower yields you more than a pen light. Such 2 years (6 issues) - £20 On a not unrelated note, earlier this spring the United is democracy. But one encounters a very different States of America welcomed Christopher Hitchens into Hitchens in his literary criticism. His essays in The the registers of its citizenry, where he joined countless Atlantic Monthly on writers including Kipling, Stoppard, Institutions others among Europe’s tired, its poor, and its huddled Buchan and beyond, are representative. There is the 1 year (3 issues) - £35 masses of contributing editors to Vanity Fair, yearning unsettling sense in the criticism of, not only a corpus, 2 years (6 issues) - £70 to breathe free—no doubt from Graydon Carter. No but a whole psychic corpse being dissected on the page dank and crowded immigration hall for Hitchens, before one’s very eyes: the organs being laid out and described in turn, the sinews and skeletal connections Please send a cheque made out to though: the ceremony was conducted on the steps The Oxonian Review of Books. of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC, and stretched and chewed, critiqued, compared with other just as the publicity campaign for his latest polemic, notable cases, and most importantly examined under God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, was bright light, in full honesty, with their blemishes All orders should be addressed to: warming up. The book has done well, becoming a and their beauties all on display. One gets these New York Times bestseller, and the buzz surrounding literary subjects in full—and one is grateful for it. Tim Soutphommasane, Editor-in-Chief, it has not been hurt by a series of convenient news- As for the man’s political mode, one may occasionally The Oxonian Review of Books, making events, notably the fact that one of the leading question the subtlety of the rhetoric, but too many candidates for the Republican nomination—Mitt Balliol College, Oxford OX1 3BJ. err in questioning his good faith. Here, of course, Romney—adheres to a religious denomination still I’m suggesting an indulgence which Hitchens all unaccepted by many in America (Mormonism), and All overseas enquiries should be addressed to: too rarely grants his enemies (was Mother Teresa— that Jerry Falwell, perhaps the most prominent voice one of the more notorious victims of Hitchens’s [email protected]. for a politicised American Christianity, has just died. polemics—really a conscious fraud)? There is always Or perhaps these aren’t so much useful conveniences the sense that Hitchens is motivated more by what continued from page 14 as they are signs that religion is always part of the he hates than by what he loves, and those hates have public conversation in America; if it hadn’t been these, remained remarkably constant, with totalitarianism Bourgeois Ethics it would have been something else. In any event, by far consistently topping the list. The most serious charge the most entertaining television in America this month regularly leveled against him—that his contrarianism is pages, this is the sort of book that could be read by was to be found on Fox News’ Hannity and Colmes, opportunistic, done for attention or even for profit— older schoolchildren and yet still inform the most where Hitchens ‘faced off ’ with Ralph Reed over won’t stick in the long run. The frustration with the advanced academic debates. And it invites debate. the legacy of Jerry Falwell. Reasonable people might man tends to arise due to his success in navigating the While McCloskey’s message throughout is ‘trust me, disagree over where the entertainment peaked. Was it post-Cold War intellectual landscape: while the Left is and you will see that I’m right,’ Dworkin simply wants when Hitchens challenged Reed to ‘play the world’s still trying to revive a struggle which has, for all intents his opponents to try to argue with him. In setting smallest violin’ while the former head of the Christian and purposes, been lost, the civilisation (Western, just his arguments out with such clarity and simplicity, he Coalition and close business associate of Jack Abramoff to be clear) that it was trying to reform from within has set conservatives who would disagree with him a counseled some measure of respect for the family of by means both democratic and revolutionary has formidable challenge. In the end, they must show that the departed? Or was it the sheer beta-maleness of come under threat from without. 1968 has come, with he has either set out parameters with which they can Colmes, who, before being completely steamrollered Hitchens very much on those barricades—right out in honestly say they disagree or else that the conclusions by his interlocutors, barely got out a single reference to Broad Street, opposite Balliol College, as a matter of he draws from the set framework are not so directly Falwell’s ‘impacting legacy,’ a piece of journalistic non- fact—but it has long gone as well, and though there drawn. But they cannot ignore the invitation to engage. speak notable not only for saying absolutely nothing, but is much work to be done in our own range of social also for completing the needless journey of the word models, those who consider ‘John Ashcroft a greater In the end, both books contain important messages. ‘impact’ from noun to verb and, now, to gerund? Or menace than Osama bin Laden,’ as Hitchens put it Paraphrasing Churchill, the sentiment is often was it when Hannity called Hitchens a ‘jack-ass,’ and, his upon departing The Nation’s editorial staff in 2002, expressed that capitalism and democracy are far from grammar coming ever so close to core meltdown, made are the ones who have missed the boat, and not he. perfect; they’re just better than all the other systems reference to that ‘pseudo-intellectually mind of yours’? It puts one in mind of Joe Louis’s remark upon joining of economics or government that have ever been tried. Sometimes we concentrate these systems down Ignorant armies, perhaps, clashing not by night but the US Army at the outset of World War II: ‘Might be a lot wrong with America but nothing Hitler can to their apparent essence and, in doing so, lose the by the dim, reflected light of the American flag which things that held such systems together. This is Adam often waves in corner of Fox News’ broadcast. Yet, fix.’ And the relevance of a remark involving National Socialism—a populist, right-wing movement born of Smith’s message, that ‘the wise and virtuous man for all the ad hominem, the positions were clear and the is at all times willing that his own private interest argument significant: just what is the role of religion the local failure of the liberal democratic model and promising a totalitarian and virtually religious solution should be sacrificed to the public interest.’ McCloskey in American society? Hannity and Reed, Christians helps restore Smith’s great insight, but capitalist in name if not always in practice, were broadly to the domination of the Volk by the an international Jewish elite—is not merely coincidental, as Hitchens democracy can’t work without political foundations supportive of Falwell’s life’s work to make a political as well. Dworkin’s contribution shows us that if we interpretation of Christianity relevant to the American would not hesitate to point out. Some say the term ‘Islamofascist,’ which he has done much to popularise, agree on values of liberty and equality, we might just scene. Hitchens, whose anti-religiosity seems part of a be able to make the old Greek experiment work. larger instinct to oppose totalitarianism in any arguable is hysterical demagoguery, and others, fair historical manifestation, wishes his newly adopted country analogy. In any event, it is an American voice now which makes the comparison, and that same voice continues Sam O’Leary is a lawyer and an alumnus of St. Peter’s to be truer to the legacy of Jefferson, and to refuse College, Oxford, where he read for the Bachelor of Civil Law. 16 the Oxonian Review of Books spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 The 2007 Oscars: Crass Globalism Kristin Anderson

indeed, ‘political’ demands a relative reading of such Watanabe endows his character with independence, Although Academy voters were reportedly dulled modifiers. Although the Best Actress nominees shrewdness and geniality. As Saigo, one of the few by 2006-07’s offerings, the popular press heralded included ‘internationals’ Penelope Cruz (for Volver), the soldiers who survives (and, not coincidentally, one this year’s Oscars as one of the most exciting and Best Supporting Actress nominees included Adriana of the main characters), Japanese pop idol Kazunari international yet. Among the heavy-hitting categories Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi (of Babel), and Alejandro Ninomiya is also convincing and provides much (Best Actor and Actress, Best Supportings, Best Gonzalez Iñárritu was nominated for Best Director comic relief in a film that otherwise is unsurprisingly Director, Best Picture) ‘a more diverse playing field was (again Babel), the winners in the main categories were despairing. Filmed partially in situ, the washed-out certainly evident’ if by diverse, that is, we mean either either US or UK actors and either US or US & UK colour-filters evoke the bunkers’ gloom and the island’s American-funded (but internationally cast) or British. productions (a coincidental inversion of this summer’s flattening, blanching heat with cinematographic Cannes Festival, where Americans won nothing— brilliance, and the landscape is stunningly desolate. Indeed, the British film industry was one of the blame The Da Vinci Code). Politically, while Al Gore’s apparent winners of 2007. Among its contenders were An Inconvenient Truth won a close race with My Country, Ironically, Eastwood seems at the height of his Notes on a Scandal, featuring a flint-faced, squinty-eyed, My Country and Iraq in Fragments (both razor-sharp directorial powers in a context that must have been cackling Dame Judi, Helen Mirren as The Queen, and documentaries about modern life in Iraq), the Big very foreign to him. Ultimately, it is a gripping film Venus, a sentimental yet agreeable film about lascivious, 6 categories seemed more politically-themed than for all of the above components, but what is singularly long-pensioned actor Peter O’Toole (sorry, played by genuinely political, just as, in fact, they seemed more impressive is that it doesn’t thump us over the head with Peter O’Toole) falling for the neck, breasts and, er, internationally-themed than genuinely international. the nobility of its balanced perspective. By avoiding the creative juices of a twenty-something chavette. As the temptation of ‘Japanese are humans too’ moralising, barely-aged muse, Jodie Whittaker holds her own in flat This, again, is not necessarily a bad thing. The brilliant Letters from Iwo Jima presents the bloody defense of a Mancunian monosyllables and miniskirts. But there is Forest Whitaker, for example, won Best Actor for strategic strip of sand as the context for compelling something wonderful about seeing the eldest generation playing an ominously jolly Idi Amin in The Last King human drama. In doing so produces a beautifully- reclining not in Bournemouth but in Brixton, and as of Scotland, and Clint Eastwood’s companion piece to shot, morally complex, cracking good war film that the octagenarian lothario, O’Toole glistens. With droll Flags of Our Fathers (2006), the Japanese-language Letters is internationally resonant and still pure Hollywood. elocution and the bluest of eyes, he orates Hanif from Iwo Jima, is moving, arresting, and sensitively Kureishi’s witty script: upon being reprimanded for scripted. While both films convey an international The sweeping ensemble-piece Babel, on the other fantasising too salaciously, for instance, his character message—in the former, the dangers of totalitarianism hand, seems less a film than a contrivance. Amores Maurice drawls, ‘There. Now I’m reflecting upon and gap-year, touristy naïveté; in the latter, the Perros director Alejandro González Iñárritu and the imminence of my own mortality. Is that better?’ simple tragedy of war--their power derives from a screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (who are currently historical- and character-based focus, chronicling engaged in a very public debate as to who can That said, none of these British films compares to the a particular real-life moment and the charismatic, claim more credit for this monumental waste of a un-nominated Dogme 95-style film Red Road. Written sometimes monstrous figure at its centre. This is what popcorn tub) have created a movie that spans three and directed by the previously Oscar-winning director Hollywood often excels at: nuanced characters and continents, four languages, and many issues: terrorism, Andrea Arnold and shot at the eponymous Glaswegian epic histories, not nuanced politics and epic insight. tourism, interracial misunderstanding, intercultural tower block, Red Road has won the grand prize at eleven misunderstanding, interpersonal misunderstanding international film festivals. But then, it has only had a When it attempts the latter, Hollywood spawns films —really, misunderstandings of any kind, piled on so partial release in America thus far, so perhaps Arnold like Blood Diamond, the earnest, unsubtly-named film fast and thick that the resulting miasma of solitude is hoping it will be considered for next year’s Oscars. about conflict diamonds that rightly earned Djimon becomes tedious even before the opening credits. Hounsou and Leonardo DiCaprio acting nods; and Realistically, though, Red Road’s chances are slim: it has Babel, whose claims upon cultural and political division While it attempts the political edginess of 2005’s neither American production money behind it nor the is similarly intimated in its towering title, and which Syriana, Babel’s plot is excruciatingly underdeveloped. likelihood of mainstream American cineplex release. collected seven Oscar nominations (but no awards). Here are the four strands: random A-listers Brad Pitt This is no different than any other art house film, be These films treat their subjects with problematic and Cate Blanchett play an American couple on a it American or East Timorese, but it does point to the glibness and excessive political correctness, and unlike tour-bus holiday in Morocco; Adriana Barraza plays obvious: that the Oscars are ‘in the “Big 6” categories, Last King and Iwo Jima, moralise so aggressively that the Mexican nanny who takes care of their strikingly anyway’ a largely Hollywood affair. Films like Pan’s plot and character are soapboxed into irrelevance. Aryan children back in California; also in Morocco, Labyrinth, directed by Mexican Guillermo Del Toro, may a herdsman gives a gun to his shepherding two boys, have been nominated for cinematography, special effects Both Hollywood to the hilt, the differences between which he’d gotten off of a Japanese trophy hunter; and and ‘Best Foreign Language Picture’, but these often Letters from Iwo Jima, which was a very good film, in Japan, that trophy hunter struggles to understand serve as consolation-prize brackets for ‘BestPicture’- and Babel, which was a mind-numbing pile of the frustrations of his deaf-mute teenage daughter. worthy films that fall outside of the wide-release multicultural offal, perhaps deserve closer scrutiny. mainstream—the Foreign Language winner, The Lives of In his commissioning of a Japanese-language script These stories are edited together jarringly and sometimes Others, is an excellent example of this. (Incidentally, Del from Japanese scriptwriters to counterbalance the disjointedly so that, at least hypothetically, you have Toro’s film did very well in the end, with Pan’s Labyrinth American perspective of Flags of Our Fathers, Clint no sense of how they will interconnect, thus implying winning for best Cinematography, Make-Up and Art Eastwood has produced a film that was well received that actions can have wide-reaching, unintended Direction and thus justly trumping Pirates of the Caribbean by the Japanese film industry, despite a few reported consequences—the whole bird-crapping-in-jungle- II, whose aesthetics this time more resembled the Disney inaccuracies. The Yomiuri newspaper even went causes-tornado-in-Torquay theory of international- ride that spawned it, and this without the rumored so far to claim that, ‘Today the person who had the relations causality. Unfortunately, this theme has cameo by the borderline animatronic Keith Richards). power to tell us the Japanese experience during the been done more convincingly and more pointedly war was Clint Eastwood, an American.’ But more before (in screenwriter Arriaga’s earlier, subtler film But for an event supposedly highlighting world importantly, it is a good film, a blistering depiction The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, for example). cinema, the 79th Annual Academy awards still oozed of an all-out massacre, and one that for the most part Hollywood. Without a big-name star or a US production eschews stereotype and simplistic characterisation. Moreover, the discontinuous narrative here seems like company on board, it is difficult for a film to earn even an editorial gimmick. The splicing of various stories a nomination, much less an award. Oscar eligibility Straight-forwardly organised, Letters from Iwo Jima and chronologies is neither a bad, nor an unusual, stipulates that a film must run for at least a week in a Los begins with the Japanese troops preparing for the technique. It can be used to remove an audience’s Angeles theatre and ‘be advertised and exploited during defense of Iwo Jima’s black sands and culminates in dependence on expectation and foreshadowing, to their Los Angeles run in a manner considered normal an extended battle sequence that is tragic, conclusive, suggest an unpredictable narrative trajectory and to and customary to the industry.’ (It does not, as we have and viscerally, starkly filmed. The titular letters promote fresh, unpresumptuous, character-driven seen this year, mandate English-language.) The Foreign home provide an uninventive but effective excuse for viewing, largely because the climax and resolution Language, Short, Documentary and Animated Films, are flashbacks into a few characters’ lives, a device that are often depicted at the outset. In Iñárritu and exempted from the above requirements, but the high- could easily slip into sentimentality and sometimes Arriaga’s hands, unfortunately, what could be a profile categories are reserved primarily for stars and does, but more often merely provides a fascinating, subversive, suggestive inquiry becomes fatalistic and their vessels. Fair play: it is, after all, a red carpet awards fleeting glimpse into imperial Japan’s political climate. altogether too tidy, and the piecemeal editing simply show dreamed up by and showcasing the best of L.A. serves to disguise a few melodramatic storylines and The acting is uniformly strong. As General Tadamichi to add the illusion of depth where there is none. But it should come as no surprise, then, that an Kuribayashi, the officer commissioned to lead his vastly What’s more, having messed up the puzzle, they then Oscar year deemed particularly ‘international’ and, outnumbered, outgunned troops to certain death, Ken insist on solving it for you. Plot-twists are sign-posted spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 the Oxonian Review of Books 17

more frequently than a roadside attraction on the Iowa desert. After the nanny leaves the children to go find most tangential, the least politicised, and necessarily plains. As soon as the boys get the gun, you know help and the children—you guessed it—are gone when the least scripted: as the deaf-mute Japanese schoolgirl that Cate Blanchett will be shot and that the boys she returns, you start to hope that the lot of them get Chieko, Rinko Kikuchi is brilliantly seething and will end up screwed. As soon as García Bernal picks eaten by coyotes, thus at least adding a bit of migración emotive in a side-story that deserved a film to itself. up the nanny and children, you know their cross- tongue-in-cheek to a film otherwise devoid of irony. border trip is ill-fated. And although the film dangles But at the end of the day, all of the components the alluring possibility that some of the disparate It does, however, have steaming shovels of self- that make Letters from Iwo Jima an interesting, Oscar- strands will not join up (thus keeping the screenplay awareness and tailors the film to an audience of worthy film—in-depth characters, authentic emotion, messy and therefore lifelike), in the end Babel ties up politically-correct moralisers. The message is placed in common humanity and a sense of grounded reality— as neatly as Julie Andrews’s brown-paper packages. the mouths of tousled blonde innocents, the cherubic are missing in Babel. Babel has the ambition of an This makes for boring cinema, leaving the audience film offspring of Cate and Brad: ‘but why are they award-winning ‘international issue’ film without nothing left to guess and leaving the actors struggling looking for us? We didn’t do anything wrong.’ No, but the filmic and political content. What little message to flesh out roles that leave little to interpretation. your parents did, and so did the whole damn world. it has even seems internally inconsistent. Babel’s Blanched colour filters here seem calculating: we’re tagline reads, ‘If you want to be understood…Listen,’ Although it is clearly angling for the position of global supposed to feel relentlessly bleak. This is ostensibly suggesting—as does its title—that it chronicles commentator, Babel is actually just a movie about stupid a movie about international responsibility: a Japanese the dangers of cultural intolerance and promotes people doing stupid, oftentimes unrealistic things. No man gives a gun to a Moroccan herdsman, a woman is transcendent connection. Yet in the end it endorses a matter how authentic the bigotry and ignorance of the shot, a boy is shot, a diplomatic incident is catalysed, a deeply isolationist view of the world, suggesting that average tour-bus crowd, I fail to believe that they would deaf-mute Tokyo girl who likes to go commando hits if lucky we might shelter in the family unit, and that have left behind a dying woman because they wanted the club scene, a Mexican wedding ends in a deportation intercultural communication is at best a futile dream. the air-conditioning switched back on. García Bernal’s and everyone, generally, is meant to feel guilty about car chase is stupid, as is the nanny taking the children the state of the world and perhaps purified by their All it all, with its tricksy editing and multinational across the border and the herdsman giving the high- guilt. It’s a movie that allows the armchair liberal to settings, Babel seems like globalism lite, profundity-by- powered rifle to his young boys. (And does no one have lean back and correct Pitt’s ugly American ignorance numbers, a cynical ploy for a few statuettes. Despite mobiles or satellite phones? There’d be no film if so.) (‘but, man, of course he doesn’t have two wives: the titular inference, the wedge driven between Babel’s he’s Moroccan’) and to reflect sagely on the blinding inhabitants isn’t linguistic: it’s opportunistic. Brokeback Babel also occasionally promotes the stereotypes it inequalities of the world and the dazzling ignorance of Mountain composer Gustavo Santaolalla won his second presumably is aiming to offset. Indeed, the Moroccan his own kind. It’s manipulative, back-patting, and facile. straight Oscar for scoring Babel, a film ‘that helped us men are not terrorists—‘yup, the Americans got that understand better who we are and why and what we one wrong’—but the character played by Gael García The film isn’t entirely without merits: the panorama are here for,’ he said. If we take him at his word, I Bernal, whose talent is wasted in this film, doesn’t of the Atlas Mountains is stunning; it has one of understand myself to be an inchoate, reductive pile of exactly disprove much about America’s ‘dangerous, the best clubbing-on-Ecstasy cams I’ve yet seen; and bleakness and stereotypes that came to be for the sake of irresponsible’ neighbour to the south. And the there was one incident of humour, when the deaf- pretension, profit and award-pandering. As its posters improbabilities keep on coming: after the aggressive mute schoolgirls banter (in sign-language) in the locker advertised, it was indeed this year’s Crash. More’s the pity. American border guards embark on a car chase after room after a volleyball match (‘She’s just premenstrual.’ a drunken Mexican (García Bernal), the nanny (well- ‘No, she’s horny.’ ‘Yeah? I’m going to fuck your dad Kristin Anderson is a DPhil Candidate in English literature played by Adriana Barraza) and two children end up to get rid of my mood.’). The most intriguing and at Exeter College, Oxford. She is an editor of The Oxonian wandering lost through the arroyos of the Californian sustained role is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the Review of Books.

High Art Lite in the Darkest Hour Emily Spears-Meers

In the darkest hour there may be light: with the surge of cash that has flooded the London few secondary market dealers happy. His ‘murderme’ Works from Damien Hirst’s murderme collection art world, for better or for worse, since their coming. collection contains some fantastic work but, like most Serpentine Gallery, London collections it contains some pretty dreadful efforts as 25 November 2006 – 28 January 2007 From across the calming waters of the Atlantic well (such as Banksy: a more literal image-maker would Ocean, Thomas Crow, the British art historian now be hard to find but, frankly, who would want to look?). ensconced in the Getty’s cracked ivory towers, has The show was therefore a bit of a mess, not only in made some lone, valiant attempts to tackle this terms of quality but also with respect to its display. Although Damien Hirst and his every breath conundrum. These have mostly taken the form of Items looked shoved into place with scant attention get miles of press in the British tabloid and other a Marxian analysis that foregrounds the evidence of to size, scale, theme or attribute—but such sloppiness newspapers, critical appreciation of the work of Hirst social history within the work. In the case of Hirst could have been exaggerated and thereby made more and his generation has been scarce. This is particularly alone, he has offered an awed take on his recent convincing, more satisfyingly, by making it less clear evident among post-YBA (Young British Artists), Mexican intervention. In general, however, the non- how exactly it is that Hirst differentiates between his and artists in the other notable art worlds. New York, YBA British art world largely hangs its head in horror obsessive collection of curiosities and art. Why not L.A. and Berlin—cities whose markets are sufficiently at the thought of acknowledging the bastard breed. go for it and really clutter the Serpentine Gallery? inflated to merit swathes of attention from not only their own but also foreign press—have dismissed ‘In the darkest hour there may be light’ therefore This style of curation is due, in part, to Hirst the British art in general with a slight sniff of disdain. offered an opportunity to take a deep breath and be phenomenon, as more than one newspaper reviewer drawn in. It included a number of seminal works pointed out: given his massive pulling power, the Eric C. Banks, writing in Artforum in January 2002, put from the YBA-era, alongside their 1980s New Serpentine needs the artist’s patronage more than he his finger on the problem: ‘The notorious difficulty of York predecessors Jeff Koons, Richard Prince needs their floor space, and he can therefore curate writing about many of the Young British Artists has and Haim Steinbach, as well as some predictably as he sees fit. In fact, Hirst’s work in general, with its always been the Hobson’s choice of approaching them dismal tat from Banksy and his younger, and by the gleeful mass production and mass concatenation (think with sombre detachment and overshooting the runway looks of it slightly lost, generation of British artists. a thousand flies, a thousand spin paintings, a thousand or, alternatively, treating them on their own terms and years) could often do with a good edit. But perhaps never really going anywhere at all.’ This circularity To quickly address the curating: since Hirst managed to that is somehow the point: he, like Warhol, has the ability has extended to next generation artists, British or catalyse the coming into being of the Young British Art and the brazen gumption to churn out as much as he otherwise, who seem loath to reference or engage in world in the early 1990s, he has played a significant role dialogue with their predecessors—not to mention in subsidising it, not to mention keeping Koons and a continued on page 19 18 the Oxonian Review of Books spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 The Contest Over Sovereignty Robbie Shilliam

Christopher J. Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe and There is, however, a difficulty with the volume’s use their populations? Useful reference points here can be Alexander Gourevitch (eds.) of theory. While the editors draw on a number of found in Christopher Bickerton and Philip Cunliffe’s Politics Without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary different philosophical traditions, they fail to explain respective chapters on state building and humanitarian International Relations in detail the theory behind the ideas they discuss. This intervention. Bickerton argues that the notion of the Routledge, 2007 is important because the theoretical framework of ‘failed state’ rests upon a re-conceptualisation of the 244 pages the editors’ introduction is used heavily to structure sovereignty of non-Western states by reference to the ISBN: 0415418070 the arguments of all the following chapters. Three potential threat they pose to the West. Policies of state sources inspire their thinking: Hegel, Marx and Weber. building based on this conceptual model attempt to And their analysis offers a synthesis of the three’s detach the process of re-constructing sovereignty from These days, the foreign policies of Western powers understandings of agency and political authority. the collective will of the people that are to be governed by may seem to an observer of the evening news to be this new authority. Cunliffe complements this position almost schizophrenic. On the one hand, the rule of It begins with Hegel’s fictional state, in which by arguing that any intervention designed to hand over law and human rights for all are proclaimed as the political authority represents the singular expression the sovereignty of ‘failing states’ to a more ‘responsible’ essential foundations of a 21st-century international of a collective will. Looking outwards, the sovereign international community robs the target population community. Long gone are the Cold War days of expresses this collective will as a ‘national spirit’ (often of the chance to determine for themselves the future UN deadlock, and even NATO—that archetypal in competition with other nations). Yet it is only with form of their society. An international politics based organisation of geo-political power politics—has re- a Marxist supplementation that the editors are able on the sanctity of self-determination is preferable to invented itself as a guarantor of human security. But to make sense of this: it is through a division of the intervention. Any oppressed group that organizes itself on the other hand, there have been a steady stream public and private in the modern capitalist state that sufficiently to fight for its own ends would be able to of military interventions by Western coalitions the individual in civil society can be linked to the force recognition of its demands at home and abroad. around the world, some with dubious grounding collective will. It is a convenient move, but Marx in international law (Iraq being the most notable). himself argued against the Hegelian ideal of singular authority. Sovereign authority was never unproblematic These contradictions could, of course, be explained in as Hegel presumed. For Marx, the public sphere was terms of ‘might makes right.’ And yet there is much not the expression of a collective will, but rather Sovereign authority was never evidence to say that Western policy makers have attempted of the particular collective will of private property unproblematic as Hegel presumed. to pursue their interests through the framework of and owners—of the capitalist class. It was not that the by reference to the liberal interpretation of the values representative depth and extent of modern civil society of ‘Western civilisation’. Robert Cooper, a key architect was imperfect, but that for systemic reasons it could of the Blair doctrine of the ‘international community’ never be the ‘universal’ sphere it professed to be. And yet, in modern history, and certainly from slavery has perhaps summarised this schizophrenic state of and colonialism onwards, Third World populations Western identity most honestly in his notion of a new But to explain the present day dissolution of sovereignty, never worked with a political agency that was ‘liberal imperialism.’ It would be nice to have the same agency and collective will, the editors look to Weber’s endogenously determined. No less than that paradigm rules covering all states, Cooper laments, but as long notion of ‘disenchantment.’ Through this notion of Third World independence—Haiti (the present as the social and political fabric of world affairs is so Weber passed judgement upon the ethical inadequacies fate of which Bickerton discusses lucidly)—enjoyed uneven as to disallow for one cut of the cloth, it is of the instrumentalisation and rationalisation of only 20 years of partial self-governance (much of best to fashion world order from two different cloths: modern bureaucratic rule wherein the ‘ends’ of which encompassed civil war) before being forced in one cut from the rule of consent and equality, the political action were increasingly redefined solely 1825 to accept an onerous French indemnity for the other cut from the rule of dictation and (temporary) in terms of the efficiency of the ‘means.’ There is, loss of the colony. This effectively mortgaged the subordination. To complicate matters further, a sense however, a discontinuity unrecognised by the editors. Haitian economy to French banks, and by the 1840s of a ‘democratic deficit’ has also developed within the If somewhat sympathetic to Marx, Weber denied Haitian liberal elites were engaged in what would populations of the West with respect to the liberal that modern bureaucratic rule and the rule of capital become known as ‘neo-colonialism’—colonialism inadequacies of many Western backed international emerged from the same historical sources—or even by economic rather than politico-military means. institutions. There is, for instance, disillusionment over from the same historical societies (Germany being the voting mechanism for a European Constitution the former and Britain the latter). The best that could The point here is that in the context of the historical and the limited accountability of economic be said, Weber believed, is that these phenomena Third World, sovereignty, as defined by the editors, organisations such as the World Bank, International shared ‘elective affinities,’ that is to say that their appears as purely an abstract category divorced Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. historical relationship was contingent rather than from the historical experience of once-colonised causal. Moreover, Weber denied Hegel’s claim that the populations. That these populations have often For some international relations scholars, such collective will held any agency as an expressive thing in struggled for self-determination (through articulations schizophrenia signals a transformation of traditional and of itself. Rather, it functioned only as an ideological that have often been more than simple duplicates of understandings of sovereignty and the nation-state. smokescreen for particular individual ‘wills to power.’ the apparently Western original) is not to be denied. The editors of Politics Beyond Sovereignty, a collection of What is to be questioned is the judging of such scholarly essays, fall squarely in this camp. But far from The point is not that the editors of Politics Without struggles against standards of sovereignty derived acquiescing to the transformation, they offer some Sovereignty must hold their sources of political theory in from Western experiences. This almost ideal-typical theoretical resistance. Any abrogation of the principle high fidelity. But as they themselves claim, the meaning standpoint might even be said to veer towards an of state sovereignty, they argue, is an abrogation of of abstract concepts do not come alive so much through imperial decree on what is the ‘right’ kind of political collective responsibility—and with that, of political logical analysis but though contestation with other agency. It ignores how political agency is differentially agency itself. Far from obsolete or undesirable, the ideas. Furthermore these ideas, again as the editors constituted according to history and geopolitics. sovereign nation-state still provides the best, if note, are produced in the context of real historical imperfect, framework for the organization of collective processes. If this is the case, then there is much In the end, however, such criticisms serve only to political life. Valorising an amorphous ‘international disagreement between Hegel and Marx, as well as underscore the greatest merit of the volume: its ability community’ serves only to dissolve political accountability. between the historical basis of modern sovereignty to draw out the analytical and (especially) ethical and the bearing of the social forces that accompanied implications of the schizophrenic nature of Western The volume makes several important contributions its emergence. However one gets the sense that the foreign policies in current world affairs. In short, the to existing political science research. For one thing, volume by and large proceeds by judging current affairs volume is an example of how one might intelligently it affirms the ideological quality of sovereignty as a against an abstract concept of sovereignty deemed in debate the seemingly endless irrationalities of political concept. Contrary to the Anglo-American take principle to be coherent and decontested. The result is international politics. In fact, Politics Without Sovereignty on Weberian sociology, it is not a technical typology question-begging. By closing down the contested nature does more: it engenders a controversial debate on of governance but something that tied to political of theoretical constructions of sovereignty, we can risk the possibilities for holding onto or reconstructing a argument and contest. Moreover, the volume directly limiting our understanding of the political possibilities meaningful politics at the global level. For this reason challenges the arrogance of some Western leaders implicated in current transformations of state sovereignty. alone, the volume is essential reading for anyone concerned that their new architectonic of global governance with international political authority and sovereignty. is beneficial to all. It does this by adeptly turning With this in mind, a caution seems required. Is it the question back on the questioners: what form of reasonable to make sense of and judge the present Robbie Shilliam is Hedley Bull Junior Research Fellow governance in the current world best guarantees condition of developing or Third World states using a in International Relations at Wadham College, Oxford. accountability and responsibility of political action? concept of sovereignty that was never experienced by spring 2007 • volume 6 • issue 2 the Oxonian Review of Books 19 Making AIDS History Rebecca Hodes

John Iliffe of responsibility. But he avoids the moralistic and lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost The African AIDS Epidemic: A History militaristic overtones of so many other accounts nothing on diseases that affect developing countries James Currey, 2006 (Countdown to Doomsday, Combating AIDS, and When only.’ Iliffe fails to consider the historical influence of 214 Pages Plague Strikes are among the more revealing, older titles), the pharmaceutical industry, and the ways in which ISBN: 0821416898 which blame African sexual mores and governmental economic structures have shaped AIDS mortality. incompetence for the emergence of the pandemic. Iliffe does nonetheless offer a judicious account of the responses of citizens to the HIV pandemic. He In 1981, doctors living in San Francisco, New York In this regard, perhaps the real value of Iliffe’s account documents the various and colourful ways in which and Los Angeles discovered a new fatal disease. Termed comes in the second half of his book. There, he Africans have organized to halt needless and mounting GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) by medical chronicles the responses to AIDS by activists, African deaths from AIDS, and argues that Western consumers authorities, the disease—what we now know as AIDS— governments south of the Sahara, and by international must accelerate their actions to ensure more equitable triggered a national panic. Fears of contamination led to organisations such as UNAIDS and the Global Fund access to essential medications. Thirteen million gay men being evicted from jobs, houses and hospitals. to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Iliffe also Africans have already died of AIDS, and we have only Morticians refused to handle the bodies of people discusses the remarkable changes resulting from the seen the end of the beginning of the epidemic. But claimed by the mysterious new syndrome. Theories development of HAART (Highly-Active Antiretroviral although we are not yet able to cure or to vaccinate abounded as to the routes of transmission. One theory Therapy), previously termed ‘Lazarus drugs’ due to their against AIDS, Iliffe notes, we are able to treat and to was the ‘fragile anus, rugged vagina’ hypothesis, which ability to restore terminal AIDS sufferers to relative contain it. The African AIDS Epidemic ends on a note of claimed that while gay men were at risk of contracting good health. One of the tragedies of AIDS, as Iliffe cautious optimism. It might just be possible to imagine a the disease, straights who stuck to ‘vanilla’ sex were safe. demonstrates, has been the situation in South Africa, world where the tide might be turning against the virus. where President Mbeki’s desire to hit back at perceived Across the Atlantic, European doctors registered the Western charges of African sexual savagery has led him to Rebecca Hodes is a DPhil student in history at Balliol new disease but with an additional risk group: members insist that poverty, rather than HIV, is the cause of AIDS. College, Oxford. Her thesis is about the cultural aspects of the of the black elite who were wealthy enough to migrate HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa, with a particular focus to the metropoles for treatment. As AIDS-patients But in his attempt, perhaps, to avoid polemics, Iliffe on film. from Francophone Africa filled Parisian hospital remains strangely silent about the patents processes beds, the ‘African connection’ was established. Stored that have protected the profits of pharmaceutical African blood samples were tested by Western medical corporations at the expense of the lives of HIV- researchers, and one from a Congolese man taken in positive Africans. No mention is made of either TRIPS continued from page 17 1959 was seropositive, thus confirming that the virus (the World Trade Organization laws on trade-related was present in Africa before it arrived in the US and intellectual property), nor of the Doha Declaration High Art Lite Europe. Age-old notions about black sexual brutality (2001) which ensured that countries like India and were revived in the popular and academic presses, while Brazil could not export their generic antiretrovirals to African governments closed ranks against this latest poor African countries unable to manufacture their own wants—although perhaps he isn’t as much of a whore as affront by expelling foreign journalists and medical or to bulk purchase the brand-name pharmaceuticals Andy: he never solicited portraits of the great dictators as researchers using public hospitals as their research sites. essential for the creation of their national treatment the ultimate Pop vixen did of Farah Dibah and the Shah. programmes. Iliffe tiptoes around the real barriers The fact that a ‘history’ of the African AIDS epidemic to treatment access: political apathy combined with Hirst’s closest contemporaries, Angus Fairhurst has now been written, and by a distinguished Professor the enormous power of the pharmaceutical lobby. and Sarah Lucas, with whom he collaborated most of Modern History at Cambridge rather than an angry recently on the 2004 Tate show ‘In-A-Gadda-Da- activist or doomsayer, is a testament to how times have Vida’, both come up trumps at the Serpentine—and changed. John Iliffe’s The African AIDS Epidemic: A another look at their work sheds a clearer light on History does not put forward any radical new notions the terms under which a critical engagement with the about the disease. Rather, it offers us a measured YBAs might be negotiated. Lucas’s Percival (2006) is a synthesis of the growing literature that now exists on the bronze replica of a tchotchke of a horse-drawn cart African epidemic. A respected scholar of African history, carrying a massive cement gherkin. Blown up to ten Iliffe brings to bear his knowledge of the continent times its size, coloured in so that it looks exactly like and its medical history in this trenchant appraisal of its ceramic forebear, and plonked on the lawn in front the social and political dimensions of the epidemic. of the gallery, Percy manages to be both hilarious and hardcore. Such a combination is present in all of Lucas’s Despite its currency, HIV remains much misunderstood, best work; inside, her Sunday Sport collages, cigarette even by informed publics. There is lingering confusion, sculptures, and banged-up car with crude wanking arm for example, about the differences between HIV (the mechanism offer a mini-retrospective of the artist. virus) and AIDS (the syndrome that results from immunosuppression by HIV). Iliffe’s account should be Fairhurst’s gorillas also stand out. Pietà (1996), required reading for anyone in need of a basic scientific his photographic self-portrait, quotes the famous overview. His description of the biological mechanisms Michaelangelo painting in the Vatican (inter alia from the of the virus—its branching into clades and subtypes, It is an unfortunate oversight, for the book ends art historical canon). In this version, however, the artist, and the intricate ways in which antiretroviral agents stop up glossing over some of the most influential and who takes on the role of Christ, is cradled by an empty the proliferation of the disease—is lucid and instructive. distressing issues about HIV. For one thing, it costs far gorilla suit, deftly conjuring pathos through a visual joke. Iliffe’s explanation of the origins of the virus is equally less to produce antiretrovirals than the pharmaceutical Likewise his life-size sculpture of a bronze gorilla, A cogent. The emergence of HIV was predicated on industry would have us believe, and many of these Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling II (2003), the improved mobility which resulted from colonial are in fact formulated in university laboratories with who looks in front of him seemingly dumbfounded transport networks, the increasing globalisation tax-payer’s funding. The patents are then purchased at his left arm, which appears to have dropped off. of travel in the 20th century, and, imperatively, by powerful companies, who hike up prices by over the introduction of Western medical technology. a hundred-fold. Information about the true amounts Both Fairhurst and Lucas know how to deliver an uneasy Hypodermic needles and blood transfusions, the spent on research and development is closely guarded by punchline; Gavin Turk’s soiled sleeping bag minus very instruments responsible for the improvements the pharmaceutical industry, but the fact that companies tramp, installed unceremoniously on the Serpentine’s in African health standards from the sixties to the like Merck and Pfizer feature in the ‘Fortune 100’ every floor, also fits in this category. It is these artists’ adept eighties, have also been crucial vectors for HIV. year bespeaks of astronomical profit-mongering. And manipulation of the joke that ought to prompt a in cases where national health departments begin to critical appreciation of the poor little YBA paragons. In what is perhaps the most widely-read tract written consider the large-scale import of generics, such as The gags are subversive—it is high art lite—and as we on the disease, AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag in South Africa in 2001, companies like Glaxo and all know, you make your victim laugh before you deliver ends with a plea to cease framing AIDS within Roche quickly offer to slash the prices on brand-name the sucker punch… all the way to the bank if need be. military metaphors: ‘The ill are neither unavoidable antiretrovirals to avoid losing their patent monopolies. casualties nor the enemy.’ Iliffe complies with this ‘Drug companies,’ as the Nobel prize-winning economist Emily Spears Meers is a writer, translator and equestrienne, request. In his account of the methods and meanings Joseph Stiglitz has written, ‘spend more on advertising and an MPhil student in international relations at Balliol of HIV’s transmission, he inevitably confronts issues and marketing than on research, more on research on College, Oxford. Poetry and Patriotism: José Martí for a New Cuba

José Martî Ismaelillo Translated by Tyler Fisher Wings Press, 2007 128 pages Valle lozano Lush Valley ISBN 0916727424 Dígame mi labriego My peasant ploughman, tell me how, As international interest turns to Cuba in the wake ¿Cómo es que ha andado How have you walked of Fidel Castro’s failing health, nineteenth-century En esta noche lóbrega Within the gloom of this dark night revolutionary poet José Martí’s 1882 poem sequence Este hondo campo? Through this low field? Ismaelillo offers an increasingly relevant account of What flowers, tell me, did you use the search for a Cuban political and poetic identity. Dígame de qué flores Magdalen College doctoral student Tyler Fisher’s new Untó el arado, To grease your plow translation of Ismaelillo will be published by Wings Press Que la tierra olorosa So that the pungent soil smells this September. Fisher’s is the first complete English Trasciende a nardos? Of lilies now? translation of Ismaelillo and offers a fresh rendering of Dígame de qué ríos And tell me from what streams you drew Regó este prado, some of the most powerful poetry in Latin American To irrigate letters. Composed for Martí’s infant son during the Que era un valle muy negro poet’s banishment from Cuba, Ismaelillo foreshadows Y ora es lozano? This valley once so barren black the modernista movement in Spanish-American poetry Yet verdant now? and presents a poignant interplay of political and Otros, con dagas grandes paternal emotion. This bilingual edition from Wings When others with large dagger blades Press will include his critical introduction and notes. Mi pecho araron: My chest have gouged, Pues ¿qué hierro es el tuyo What iron then is this of yours Tyler Fisher is presently completing his dissertation on Spanish Que no hace daño? That makes no wound? Counter-Reformation poetry. He is a past contributor to The Y esto dije – y el niño All this I asked the little lad, Oxonian Review of Books and his work has appeared in Riendo me trajo The Lyric, The Formalist, and Bibliophilos. Who laughing brought En sus dos manos blancas To me within his two white hands Un beso casto. An unstained kiss.

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