£2.00 Oxonianthe Review hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2 of books

Márquez’s sad whores: Glen Goodman Joseph Nye on playing the power game When things go wrong in Libya: John Bohannon Th e miseducation of Tom Wolfe: Jenni Quilter Marjane Satrapi’s alternative Iran: Kristin Anderson Th e life and times of Glenn Gould: Ditlev Rindom

Once upon a time, and what happened next ... by Philip Pullman 2 the Oxonian Review of books hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2

In this Issue: From the Editor Features n 1951, Th eodor Adorno claimed that ‘cultural criti- ing: standing up against McCarthyism and the House Talking power cism exists in confrontation with the fi nal level of the Un-American Activities Committee, campaigning for Tim Soutphommasane and Shaun Chau interview I Joseph Nye page 4 dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after the freedom of dissident writers, especially in the former Auschwitz is barbaric, and that also gnaws at the knowl- USSR, and protesting against all forms of censorship. Once upon a time, and what happened next ... edge which states why it has become impossible to write Most recently, he publicly criticised the invasion of Iraq Philip Pullman page 10 poems today’. Th is statement, often reduced to the axiom and subsequent abridgements of civil liberties. ‘to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric’, remains ‘Forty years after the Holocaust, I can speak about Oxford Authors in Print to this day one of the most provocative challenges not Memory, but not about Versöhnung, or reconciliation’, The latest publications from Oxford-based authors page 19 just for poets (as well as writers, journalists, cultural and wrote Eli Wiesel, one of the foremost writers on the political critics, philosophers, and world leaders), but also Holocaust. If reconciliation is still not possible in 2005, for Holocaust survivors and all those who have inherited at least we might in our own humble ways aim to the the legacy of the Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ and live with preserve the memory of those past atrocities (and the les- the after-eff ects of the Second World War. Indeed, even sons they may reveal) and continue to fi ght passionately after the First World War, many writers struggled to fi nd for universal human rights. Reviews the words (and images and metaphors) to express the disillusionment of war, demonstrating that the meth- § The Nonagenarian and the Nymphette ods and means of the previous century were no longer On Gabriel García Márquez’s newest novel suffi cient to truly represent the horrors of the twentieth Th is Spring 2005 issue of Th e Oxonian Review of Books Glen Goodman page 3 century. Today, Adorno’s claim continues to be put to the includes some unique contributions. Oxford based writer From Prophecy to Punk test. On 27 January 2005 when world leaders gathered Philip Pullman shares his insights on ‘openings’ and his Marjane Satrapi’s Alternative Iran in Poland to remember the sixtieth anniversary of the experiences with the recent National Th eatre production Kristin Anderson page 6 liberation of Auschwitz, international newspapers were of his trilogy ‘His Dark Materials’. John Bohannon, Sci- careful to report the event so as not to cause off ence, but ence journalist and recent Balliol post-graduate, off ers an When things go wrong in Libya the outpouring of angry ‘Letters to Editors’ suggested that account of his recent trip to Libya to investigate the case John Bohannon page 8 no matter the eff ort it was nearly impossible not to do so. of the Bulgarian nurses on trial for the contamination of Fighting for recognition In light of this, it is a great and rare relief when fi lms such a children’s hospital with the AIDS virus sheds. His essay Stevie Smith in combat as ‘Alles auf Zucker!’ (a family comedy about the reunion sheds new light on the disparity between Libya’s newly- Will May page 12 of a notorious East German gambler and his Orthodox minted international image and the reality of its health brother, directed by Dani Levy) are produced with slap- and legal systems. Th e collision of politics and litera- Re-writing the score stick humour and political incorrectness and achieve box ture is explored in several pieces including an interview Kevin Bazzana’s Glenn Gould Ditlev Rindom page 13 offi ce success—unfathomable and unacceptable possibili- with Joseph Nye, Professor at Harvard and currently in ties in Adorno’s era. residence at Balliol, whose novel, Th e Power Game: A Prime obsession Th e last few months have witnessed the deaths of Washington Novel, off ers a rare inside view of issues of John Derbyshire on the Riemann hypothesis public fi gures including Susan Sontag (28 December defence, non-proliferation and intelligence inside the Florian Huehne page 14 2005) and Arthur Miller (10 February 2005) who both White House. Kristin Anderson examines the personal made signifi cant contributions to the preservation of the and the political in her review of Marjane Satrapi’s Perse- Living and loving dangerously Sandor Marai’s Casanova in Bolzano moral conscience of a nation and individually fought for polis, a black-and-white graphic memoir about growing Angma D. Jhala page 15 human rights and peace. Sontag (who briefl y attended up in post-revolution Iran. Other unusual contributions St Anne’s College in 1957), a passionate opponent of include reviews of Kevin Bazzana’s new biography of the The H Word various causes including the Vietnam War, was known for pianist, Glenn Gould, and John Derbyshire’s Prime Obses- Tom Wolfe and Bad Education the breadth of her critical intelligence and subject matter sion: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Puzzle Jenni Quilter page 16 ranging from pornography to fascism, and was heavily in Mathematics. Our literature reviews include one of Central & Eastern Europe criticised by both the right and the left. In the aftermath the fi rst analyses of Memoria de mis putas tristes, Gabriel Transition from within of 9/11, she provoked strong reactions with her state- García Márquez’s eagerly awaited fi rst book in ten years; a Kalin Ivanov page 18 ment in the New Yorker: ‘Where is the acknowledgment fresh perspective on the life of the poet, Stevie Smith; an that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or analysis of Tom Wolfe’s new novel, I am Charlotte Sim- “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack mons in the context of his other novels; and a review of on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as Sandor Marai’s Casanova in Bolzano, a refreshing retelling a consequence of specifi c American alliances and actions?’ of the life of the famous lover Casanova, fi rst published in Arthur Miller, who won every major prize in his fi eld, is Hungary in 1940 and recently translated into English. best known for his plays, ‘Death of a Salesman’ and ‘Th e Poetry & Art Crucible’. He explored his own engagement with the Holocaust in ‘Incident at Vichy’ (1965), and through- Avery T. Willis, Editor-in-Chief Balliol College After Horace: II.3 page 5 out his life, was devoted to human rights issues includ-

After Horace: II.10 page 16 After Horace: I.23 Anabella Pomi page 16 Got a letter to the editor? Three Portraits Steven Stowell page 18 [email protected]

Blackwells will off er a gift voucher worth £25 to the writer of the best letter to For special features and back issues, please visit: the editor http://www.oxonianreview.org Want to advertise? [email protected] Cover Photo: ‘Double Fence at Auschwitz’ reproduced by kind permission of the Wiener Library. Graphic cells (p. 7) reproduced by kind permission of Random House. hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2 the Oxonian Review of books 3

the Th e Nonagenarian & the Nymphette Oxonian Review of books On Gabriel García Márquez’s newest novel http://www.oxonianreview.org

Th e year of my ninetieth birthday I wanted to give Gabriel García Márquez Editor in Chief myself a night of mad love with an adolescent virgin. Memoria de mis putas tristes Alfred A. Knopf, 2004 . Avery T. Willis or most readers, this opening line may smack more 112 pages ISBN: 140004443X Fof Henry Miller or Vladimir Nabokov than the Senior Editor perfumed, sensual prose of Gabriel García Márquez; but, like the Nobel Prize winner’s previous novels, the fi rst Kristin Anderson sentence of Memoria de mis putas tristes (literally ‘memoir of my sad whores’) engages the reader while encapsulat- Executive Editor ing the central motivation of the narrative. Th e book— Brian Flanagan García Márquez’s fi rst work of fi ction in a decade—relates the nonagenarian narrator’s fi rst encounter with actual love, revealing the late-blooming romantic hidden deep Editors within himself. Chris Bradley Th e anonymous narrator, self-described as ‘ugly, tim- Emma Cavell id, and anachronistic’, lives in a crumbling but beautiful Josh Cherniss Phil Clark aristocratic home in an unspecifi ed city on the Caribbean Len Epp coast. Th e solitude of old age and life-long bachelorhood Th e delicacy of this deferred release adds a particular Alex Kalderimis dominates his existence: he lives alone, subsisting on potency to García Márquez’s prose; the reader searches Katherine Lafrance memories of his saintly mother and the meagre pensions and waits for a climactic discharge to the bottled-up Thomas Marks April Warman provided him by careers in journalism and teaching. His frustration of the couple’s erotic yet sexless lives. Instead David Williams only activities outside his dilapidated residence are the oc- the author off ers only tales of the corrupted diversions the casional concert and a weekly column in the local news- narrator had experienced in his bizarre encounters with paper. His sole accomplishment before we meet him on previous ‘sad whores’. During this highly erotic period of Associate Editors his ninetieth birthday, he admits, has been his prodigious late-life celibacy, the narrator tells us of his fi rst sexual ex- Catherine Lee sexual career. ‘I have never slept with a woman without perience at the age of twelve, when he was raped by some Shaun Chau Tim Soutphommasane paying her’, he boasts—no small fi nancial feat consid- local prostitutes, and then recounts numerous failed and ering that between the ages of twenty and fi fty he had superfi cial love aff airs: the forced sodomizing of a washer- slept with 514 diff erent women. His meticulous record woman and other such dysfunctional sorts of ‘love’. Only Online Editor of names and other ‘details’ was to become, literally, the when he frees himself of the apparent necessity of sexual Paul Vetch eponymous Memoir of My Sad Whores. We only receive intercourse is he able to fi nd true love with Delgadina. an incomplete version however, as these former encoun- He discovers ‘that love is not a state of the soul but rather ters are eclipsed by the events of his ninetieth birthday. a sign of the Zodiac’, particularly revealing for a narrator Online Assistant He refl ects that 29 August represented ‘the beginning of a born under Virgo. Will May new life at an age when the majority of mortals are dead’. Up to this point, those familiar with the source of the In order to fulfi ll his fantasy and fi nd the above-men- book’s epigraph—the Japanese Nobel Prize winner Yasu- Acknowledgements tioned adolescent virgin, the narrator enlists the help of nari Kawabata’s short story ‘Th e House of the Sleeping Rosa Cabarcas—a brassy madam not unlike Gone with Beauties’—will quickly see many parallels. In ‘Th e House Andrew Graham, Master of Balliol College Frances Cairncross, Rector of Exeter College the Wind’s Belle Watling—who is more concerned with of the Sleeping Beauties’, the main character Eguchi Sir Michael Scholar, President of St John’s College the possibility of fi nding a virgin on such short notice frequents a surreal brothel where old men pay to sleep Sir Timothy Lankester, President of Corpus Christi College than the anonymous protagonist’s age. ‘I don’t mind beside young, drugged virgins. As Eguchi learns to ex- Eric Bennett, Home Bursar of Exeter College changing diapers’, he dryly remarks upon learning the perience Eros without physical contact, he recounts past Dr Henry Hardy, Wolfson College Michael Hugman only girl willing is 14 years old. Rosa eventually drugs the conquests and longs to return to the height of his sexual Rachael Kerr, QI girl to alleviate her fears, leaving the virgin passed-out and prowess. Love as discovered under the sheets next to a unconscious of her imminent defl owering. dormant maiden is a curse: the impossibility of release On the edge of pornography, García Márquez frustrates the Japanese gentleman to the point of anguish. Friends of Th e Oxonian Review wrenches us back into the benignly erotic: rather than Th e narrator of Memoria de mis putas tristes approximates Balliol College sleep with the unconscious girl, the narrator watches Eguchi in a biographical sense; obviously García Márquez Corpus Christi College Exeter College her attentively, overcome by her innocence and beauty. drew heavily on his appreciation for Kawabata during St John’s College Night after night he returns to Rosa his writing process. However, the Cabarcas’s bordello to lie next to the Latin American narrator fi nds new Prof. Martin McLaughlin Dr. Graham Nelson girl he christens Delgadina, ‘little ‘I don’t mind changing diapers’, he life rather than sorrow in his love skinny girl’. Although no longer for Delgadina. His abstinence Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies Library dryly remarks upon learning the English Faculty Library drugged, Delgadina sleeps—or springs not from physical inability Jesus College Library pretends to sleep—through each girl is only fourteen years old. but psychological fulfi llment; sex Lady Margaret Hall Library encounter, interacting with the nar- has become marginal, merely ‘the Magdalen College Library rator only through body language consolation that one has when love Balliol MCR and the occasional note left on the bathroom mirror doesn’t reach him’. Campion Hall in lipstick. Gradually the old man manufactures an In the second half of the novel’s mere one hundred Harris Manchester MCR ‘identity’ for the silent girl, complete with personal tastes, pages, García Márquez distils the timeworn progression Hertford JCR Jesus MCR aspirations, and responsibilities, and subsequently falls in of literary romance: initial bliss, followed by jealously, Linacre CR love for the fi rst time. However, the protagonist is not separation, and reconciliation. Th e narrator channels Magdalen MCR merely a Pygmalion enamoured with the ‘perfection’ of an these emotions into his newspaper articles-cum-love Pembroke MCR inanimate form. He feeds off of this perceived perfection letters, emerging as a strange sort of sex symbol within St Hugh’s MCR St John’s MCR (read: her youthful form as well as the invented ‘content’ the tropical town. Th e depth and verity of his love for of her life) and becomes rejuvenated himself; the mere Delgadina is demonstrated when he suspects that Rosa possibilities of his relationship with Delgadina drives him, Cabarca has ‘rented’ Delgadina to another man. Sud- The Oxonian Review of Books is published primarily by gradu- not just her aesthetic attributes. Th eirs is an abstract yet denly this ninety-year-old becomes a raging monster, ate members of the University of Oxford, although it welcomes fulfi lling love, one that emancipates him from the ‘servi- contributions from other University members. Contributors destroying everything in sight and rebuking the girl as a bear sole responsibility for its content, which in no way refl ects tude that kept [him] subjugated since the age of thirteen’; whore, thereby grouping her with his previous, meaning- the views of the University of Oxford. All works are copyright of in other words, it frees him from sex itself. less conquests. No one ‘grows up’ when it comes to love, their respective authors. 4 the Oxonian Review of books hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2

or perhaps García Márquez thinks no one ought to; even at ninety the protagonist’s passions are as deeply volatile a mix of love and hate as could be found at a sixth-form social. Talking power In the ensuing separation—during which time he licks his emotional wounds—the narrator rekindles a Tim Soutphommasane and Shaun Chau interview Joseph Nye relationship with a previous ‘sad whore’ and they travel together, ruminating on age, sex, and love. Th e seasoned prostitute reprimands him for losing Delgadina, saying Joseph S. Nye Jr. To understand the purpose behind the writing of Th e ‘there is no worse misfortune than to die alone…You are The Power Game: Power Game, as well as the concept of soft power that not going to die not having tried the marvels of screwing A Washington Novel Public Aff airs, 2004. lurks in the shadows of its pages, we interviewed Professor with love’. Galvanized, the old man returns to Delgadina 247 pages Nye, currently on leave from Harvard as a visiting fellow to fi nd what he describes as ‘real life, at last’. Th e narra- ISBN: 1586482262 at Balliol College and the Department of Politics and tor and Rosa Cabarcas become pseudo-parents to the girl, International Relations in Oxford. making her benefactor of both their estates. The Power Game Th e book closes, in stark contrast to Kawabata’s Professor Nye, why did you decide to write ? short story, with the protagonist looking to the future Nye: I’ve been intrigued by questions about ethics and with anticipation—resigned to a happy death well into power for some time, and thought I could explore it with his hundreds. In the end, we have little choice but to more subtlety perhaps than I could in academic prose. identify with the narrator and surrender any reserva- I’m particularly interested in the seductiveness of power. tions about abnormal forms of love or sexuality we had When you get into a position of power you can become been harboring throughout the book. Th e undeniable tempted by the opportunities it presents. Th en, the ques- universality of growing old—fostered within the novel by here are very few professors of political science tion becomes one of how you keep your own sense of the anonymity of the protagonist—cannot but touch any Twriting novels today. Joseph Nye may be the only balance or moral compass. I found that when I fi rst went reader, regardless of age. And it is dangerously diffi cult to one. Until recently the Dean of the Kennedy School to Washington during the Carter administration, I had to avoid speculating that the author has not thrown a bit of of Government at Harvard University, Nye’s name is adjust to a very diff erent kind of environment. It’s some- himself into his aged character; although a presumptuous synonymous among students of politics and international thing I try to describe in the chapters of the book, when confl ation, the narrator’s perspectives on old age become relations with the concept of ‘soft power’. He is also I deal with what it’s like to go from an academic career more poignant with García Márquez’s 76-year-old voice esteemed as one of the most senior national security advi- to a bureaucratic political struggle. Part of my reason for echoing behind the written word. However, Memoria sors. During the Clinton years, Nye served as Assistant writing the book grew out of that—the question of how is most successful not as a tale about growing old, but Secretary of Defense for International Security Aff airs to keep your sense of balance. Another part of it grew rather rejuvenation and fi rst love, even in the strangest of and as Chair of the National Intelligence Council; and out of my work in the Carter administration in trying to circumstances. had John Kerry won last year’s presidential election, it stop the spread of nuclear weapons. At the time we knew Admittedly, to some readers it might appear that the was expected that Nye would have been off ered a senior that Pakistan was trying to get a nuclear bomb, and the plot of Memoria is merely a Latin American stereotype, post in the administration. But now, if only temporarily, question was whether we could use force to stop Pakistan. too full of sex and humidity. García Márquez has execut- Nye has chosen a diff erent medium for exploring ideas Th is got wrapped up in the plot of the book as well. So ed another work of extreme verbal and narrative fecun- in the world of foreign aff airs, turning his mind from part of writing Th e Power Game was personal, and part of dity, a style made famous in novels such as One Hundred the intricacies of international relations theory to the no it had to do with certain policy questions. Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera less testing demands of character development, plot and There are obvious similarities between Joseph Nye and Peter (1985). However, I would caution the English-language dialogue. Cutler. How much of Joseph Nye is there in Peter Cutler? And, reader of García Márquez (the second most translated In his fi rst novel Th e Power Game, Nye tells a tale more generally, how much autobiography was involved in The Power Game? Spanish-language author after Cervantes) from conceiv- of political intrigue and power within the Washington ing of any part of Memoria de mis putas tristes as typify- defence and foreign policy establishment centring around Nye: No one character in the novel is a one-on-one map- ing Latin American literature as a whole. Such cliché Pakistan selling nuclear technology to Iran. It is a story ping with anybody. Th e nice thing about fi ction is you (though often endearing) elements as fantastical sexual to which Nye brings his own experience of working can take bits and pieces from people and make characters histories, isolated tropical towns, and decaying colonial on defence, non-proliferation and intelligence matters. of your own. Th ere are a number of things Peter Cutler mansions are not archetypes of Latin American writing Indeed, on the surface, the story of Th e Power Game is experiences which were things that I experienced. But in general but rather of García Márquez himself. For this not dissimilar from the author’s own life. Peter Cutler, an there are also experiences that I didn’t experience. Th e reason, Memoria is a welcome, if inevitably minor, addi- idealistic political scientist, is lured from his comfortable book is a composite of these things. I would think of tion to his oeuvre, with little chance of reaching canonical academic post at Princeton University by the off er of a events or actions that happened to friends of mine that I status (although publishing practices in the Anglophone plum position as Undersecretary of State for Security Af- put into Peter Cutler’s life. Th e Power Game is not auto- world may make it appear as such). fairs in Washington. Cutler begins somewhat naïvely, but biographical in a one-to-one sense. Th e English translation of Memoria de mis putas tristes quickly fi nds his feet in the high-stakes power politics of The Power Game will carry the title A Memory of My Melancholy Whores The picture that comes out of is that power the Washington elite. is really the only currency that counts in Washington. Is this (an odd rendering of the original) and is due out in Perhaps unsurprisingly, soft power, the idea for which the harsh reality of life there? September 2005. Edith Grossman, the book’s translator, Nye is best known, forms an important backdrop to the Nye: If you’re not successful in power games, you can’t has worked extensively with the pillars of modern Latin book. Since fi rst coining the term in the late 1980s, Nye accomplish the purposes you had set out. If you want American literature, García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, has been a prominent advocate of soft power, that is, the to use power for good, you have to obtain power fi rst of and Nicanor Parra (her version of Vargas Llosa’s Feast deployment of the ‘attractive’ power of cultural values all. Th e question is what are your means in seeking out of the Goat [2001] is of particular note). Hopefully her and diplomacy, as opposed to economic and military power, and what is the relationship between your means ‘melancholy whores’ can approximate the density and coercion, to achieve political ends. Elsewhere Nye has and your ends. But I think by and large the danger is one playfulness of García Márquez’s putas tristes. criticised the current US administration for being too in which you become entranced with the means of power, unilateralist in its approach to foreign policy and failing Glen Goodman is an American MPhil student in European literature the intrinsic satisfaction you get from power, and you to engage suffi ciently with other countries. In the fi gure at Exeter College. His work focuses on Latin American Literature. forget about the larger ethical purposes you were trying to of Cutler, Nye is able to develop and test the concept of pursue. soft power, showing not only in its manifest strengths, but also at times, its potential weaknesses. How do you avoid this trap of power? Is it possible to avoid Politics aside, it is perhaps ethics with which Nye is it? most concerned in Th e Power Game. Cutler is an intel- Nye: Well, yes, you can. You keep a sense of perspective ligent, decent man who is steadily corrupted by power on who you are, and not let yourself become too self- politics. Nye seems to ask: What is the price of power? important. It helps to have a good spouse who can keep Can power ever be used purely for justifi ed ends? What you from running off the rails, and give you a sense of The undeniable universality of growing old— truth is there in Lord Acton’s dictum that power tends balance. It helps to get away from Washington, whether fostered within the novel by the anonymity to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Th e it be through running or taking a long walk in the woods, personal and political fortunes of Cutler, ending ulti- or anything that makes you step back and get a little bit of the protagonist—cannot but touch any mately in his political downfall, provide the setting for of perspective. One of my friends in Washington talked reader, regardless of age. an exploration, if not necessarily a resolution, of these about escaping up to the balcony and watching the peo- provocative questions. ple on the dance fl oor. It’s hard to have that perspective hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2 the Oxonian Review of books 5 when you’re in the middle of the dance fl oor. Occasion- the 70s. And part of that was because we changed our After Horace: II.3 ally you have to put yourself up on the balcony. policies. We got out of Vietnam, we had an emphasis on Enjoy the fl eeting hour! The main character in The Power Game, Peter Cutler, clashes human rights. So there are things you can do to regain with hawks in the White House and the Pentagon in arguing soft power. I think in the case of the aftermath of Iraq, Aequam memento rebus in arduis… for more diplomacy and less heavy-handed strategies. You you have Bush’s ability to achieve a political solution in have been a very vocal advocate of ‘soft power’, that is, the Iraq, the ability to make real progress in the Middle East Dellius, my friend power of persuasion and attraction. Is it possible to read The with the peace process, and the willingness to be more Remember to keep a calm mind Power Game as an allegory about soft power? consultative in its foreign policy style. And in the early When life is rough Nye: I drew this novel as one in which soft power doesn’t stages of the second term of the Bush Administration, it’s And likewise, when life is good prevail. Peter Cutler advocates soft power but he doesn’t almost as though it’s rediscovered soft power. It seems to Restrain from excessive joy. win. And I think in that sense I don’t think I was writing be heading in that direction, but it’s probably too early to For whether you live a fi ctionalized version of my book about soft power. I was make a defi nitive judgment. In perpetual gloomy times, or turning to a diff erent question—about how power relates Is rebuilding American soft power the most important chal- to morality whether it be soft power or hard power. And lenge facing America at the moment in the international Recline your holidays in remote meadows, so essentially it’s a story about decline and fall. Peter context? Indulging in Falernian wine Cutler starts out with good intentions, but in the process Nye: I think it’s extraordinarily important because in the From your innermost cellar, he becomes corrupted by power. It’s not an allegory of long run you can’t prevail in the struggle against Jihad- You will die. soft power as much as it is a description of power and ist terrorism unless you rebuild your soft power. And morality and I read the ending as slightly optimistic but the reason is that you can’t kill all the possible terrorists, somebody could read it as pessimistic. Why do the tall pine because there will always be a new supply of terrorists And white poplar You’ve said in one interview that at a conference in 2003, coming along. Th erefore your ability to win the hearts Love to form a hospitable shade Donald Rumsfeld was asked about his opinion on soft power, and minds of the populace from which the terrorists will but replied he didn’t know what it meant. Is soft power try to recruit is the secret to success in the war. With their branches? something that has been ignored within defense and foreign Why does the fl eeing water labour policy circles in Washington? It might be said that soft power can’t be used by America to combat the threat of terrorism eff ectively. For example, you Nervously over its twisted course? Nye: It has been ignored in the Pentagon—by the civilians might ask why Islamist terrorists would care about America’s Th is is it: Tell them to bring in the Pentagon. But it’s not ignored in the State De- attractiveness when they want to destroy America. Where partment. For example, Colin Powell used the term soft does soft power then fi t in? Wine and perfume and the brief blooms of roses, power and he often referred to it. It is ironic that it is not While life and time and the black threads Nye: I think that’s true so far as the terrorists themselves. ignored by many within the military, who know that win- Of the three Sisters of Fate allow it. You’re not going to attract bin Laden or Al Qaeda and the ning hearts and minds is part of winning the battle. But point is you need hard power to respond to bin Laden the people who came in around Rumsfeld and Cheney and Al Qaeda. Th e question I’m raising is how do you You will leave the forest remain very fi xated with hard power and I think under- prevent bin Laden and Al Qaeda from recruiting a new You bought and your house play the role of soft power. generation of replacements or from broadening their ap- And your villa washed clean We’ve recently had what seem to be successful elections in peal. Th at’s where your soft power comes in. If you’re at- By the yellow Tiber river. Iraq. Does this demonstrate that the use of hard power over tractive to the larger majority of the Muslim world, they’ll soft power with respect to Iraq has been justifi ed? You will leave them be less able to persuade other people from supporting Nye: It’s probably too early to make a judgment about what I would say is their narrow and ideological version And your heir will inherit Iraq. If you try to do a balance sheet on Iraq after the fi rst of their religion which they’re propounding. Th e wealth you have built up to great heights. year, I think you can say that the negatives outweigh the Are there any countries at the moment that are using soft positives. After a year and a half, you’ve had the elections, power more eff ectively than the US? Whether you live you’ve seen a little bit more of the positive side of the Under the sky a rich man balance sheet than you did before. But much will depend Nye: Europe has been eff ective in its use of soft power, if Or a poor man on whether you were able to create a stable government, you look at the ability of Europe to attract other countries whether you have really established democracy, whether to join the EU, and the eff orts that countries like Turkey From the lowest family, ordinary Iraqis are truly better off than they were before, have made in changing their policies on human rights It makes no diff erence. and democratic reform. A lot of that can be attributed to whether that justifi es the number of people killed. Th ose You are still a miserable victim of Orcis, Europe’s soft power. But the Europeans, while they have are the things that you might be able to identify only after Of Death. ten years. At this stage, if you’re trying to sum up the bal- been eff ective in their use of soft power, sometimes don’t ance sheet, it’s still probably more heavily negative than pay enough attention to the need for hard power. We are all gathered together positive. Th is is not to take away from the importance of Finally, Professor Nye, are there times when you miss the the Iraq election, which was a very signifi cant achieve- politics of Washington? To the same place ment, but we should put it into context of a continuing Nye: At times. If Kerry had won last year, I probably For the same purpose: stream of events. would have been invited to go back to Washington and For all Critics of the current Bush administration would say that probably would have succumbed to the temptation to go Th e lot shaken in the urn of Fate American soft power has suff ered immeasurably in recent back. Th ere’s something about having your hands on the Sooner or later years, with perceptions of American unilateralism and the levers of power, about people able to shape policy in what Will come out neoconservative thrust of American foreign policy. Is this a you would consider to be a good direction. It would have fair assessment? And if so, how long will it take to recover And put us on the boat for eternal exile. American soft power? been a very tempting proposition. Nye: Looking back at the Vietnam period, when America Anabella Pomi was very unpopular around the world because of the Tim Soutphommasane is an MPhil student in political theory at Vietnam War, you had a situation where America had Balliol College. Shaun Chau is an MPhil student in comparative so- managed to turn around its unpopularity by the end of cial policy at Green College. Both hail from Sydney, Australia.

David Constantine Comma Press announces the hometown launch of Under the Dam, the fi rst full collection of short stories by acclaimed poet, trans- Under the Dam lator and Modern languages fellow, David Constantine. From an Americanized Moscow to the shores of the Hebrides, these stories Comma Press, 2005. £7.95 resonant with a haunting sense of place and a knack for freeze-framing each character’s life just at the moment when the past breaks the surface, or when the present - like the dam of the title - collapses under its own weight. ‘A haunting collection fi lled with delicate clarity. Constantine has a sure grasp of the fear and fragility within his characters.’ A. L. Kennedy

Wednesday 20 April Oxford Borders, 9 Magdalen Street, Oxford, OX1 3AD (01865 203 901). 7pm. Free. 6 the Oxonian Review of books hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2

From Prophesy to Punk Marjane Satrapi’s alternative Iran

Marjane Satrapi mantle of Che Guevera, forming schoolyard juntas and Satrapi makes friends with the marginalised, with second- Persepolis: The Story of an at one point somewhat bemusedly yelling at her mother, ary-school punks who smoke up, fl ip through Sartre (‘my Iranian Childhood Pantheon Books, 2003. ‘Dictator! You are the guardian of the revolution of this comrades’ favourite author…I found him a little annoy- 160 pages house!’ (Subsequently, when Allah still makes the odd ing’), and admire her because she’s ‘known death’; and ISBN: 0375422307 appearance in her dreams, conversations become a bit with anarchists, whose main subversive pastimes include awkward: ‘So you don’t want to be a prophet anymore?’ playing volleyball, misquoting Bakunin and doing a bit of Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return ‘Let’s talk about something else.’ ‘…You think I look like LSD. With droll precision, she zips through her intellec- Pantheon Books, 2004. Marx?’ ‘I told you to talk about something else.’ ‘…To- tual development, voraciously absorbing everything from 192 pages morrow the weather’s going to be nice.’) the history of the commune (‘I concluded that the French ISBN: 0375422889 For all of its charm and idiosyncrasies, her privileged right of this epoch were worthy of my country’s funda- perspective can at times seem a bit at odds with her mentalists’) to her mother’s much-loved de Beauvoir: mage is an international language,’ Iranian graphic prefatory goals: this is hardly an everyman’s story. Her Simone explained that if women peed standing artist Marjane Satrapi declares. ‘When you draw ‘I Iran is a small one, a snapshot of Tehranian upper-middle up, their perception of life would change. So I a situation—someone is scared or angry or happy—it class intellectuals who can aff ord to send their children tried. It ran lightly down my left leg… Seated, means the same thing in all cultures… It is more acces- abroad when domestic politics get too dodgy. Although it was much simpler. And, as an Iranian woman, sible.’1 For her, this is less comment than credo: from the she mentions that her grandfather was a prince and before learning to urinate like a man, I needed outset, it is clear that Satrapi is targeting an international later served as prime minister under Reza Shah, we also to learn to become a liberated and emancipated market. Persepolis (2004), Satrapi’s two-volume graphic don’t know why the vocal Satrapis can remain relatively woman. memoir of her upbringing in, egress from and return to unscathed both fi nancially and politically through such She manages this emancipation thoroughly, if fi t- post-revolutionary Iran, contains a fi ercely propagandistic tumultuous times. How little she and her family suff er fully. Her sexual adolescence —the ridiculousness of her streak which is advanced by her choice of the graphic by comparison is a constant, guilty theme, and Satrapi is fi rst boyfriends, living with eight gay men, developing medium. Certainly, her striking, tender illustrations and blunt about both her guilt and her privilege. Schoolyard a sizeable ass—is traversed with typical retrospective necessarily laconic text both work compellingly towards falsehoods of revolutionary one-upmanship (of the ‘my self-mockery. (Early attempts at romance are candid and one end: correcting western misperceptions of Iran. dad’s in prison’…‘yeah, well, my dad’s been dismembered’ cringingly recognisable.) Secure fi nally in her sexuality, Writing from Paris in the paranoid political climate ilk) are recalled with embarrassment; and years later her intellect and her fi ercely-guarded independence, she of early 2002, Satrapi fi nished Persepolis amidst the she admits, after being arrested and fi ned yet again for fi nishes secondary school with moderate success and, after militant grumblings of a White House already anticipat- alcohol consumption, that, ‘To be able to party, you had a brief stint on the streets owing to bad luck and a drug ing a ‘pre-emptive liberation’ of ‘evil’ Iran. Such Western to have means.’ habit, heads back to Tehran. demonising is precisely what Persepolis seeks persuasively Progressing episodically through her childhood, the to undermine. Indeed, while critical of the Iranian theoc- fi rst volume of Persepolis addresses more serious and form- When she returns to Iran, however, her re-immersion is racy, Satrapi remains a fervent patriot at heart, explicitly ative political occurrences than the second, albeit from a far from easy: Tehran’s streets have been renamed after the asserting her memoir as a counter-narrative to Western more oblique vantage point. Her perspective matures as martyrs whose faces now adorn building-sized murals; her prejudice. Th e fi rst volume of Persepolis is prefaced by a she ages. Book one begins with childlike naivety: political childhood friends have lost limbs in the trenches or have simple, and at times simplistic, polemic—part Iranian- events are fi ltered through day-to-day happenstance. Th is glammed up into husband-hunting hostesses; there is a history-for-dummies (‘yet the Persian language and is an aff ective strategy, resulting in a seemingly immediate palpable, silent tension between her parents; and her em- culture withstood these invasions, and the invaders as- and unmediated narrative. Historical watersheds—the barrassment over what she regards as the personal failures similated into this strong culture, in some ways becoming burning of the Rex Cinema, the US embassy hostage of the previous four years, particularly when contrasted Iranians themselves’) and part mission statement: ‘this crisis—are nightmarishly surreal and fl eeting, conjured with hardships of a nation, leads to a chain of uncom- old and great civilization has been mentioned mostly in out of schoolyard gossip and adult whispers. As her prehending therapists and eventually a suicide attempt. connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and ter- political consciousness develops, however, so too does Having reached her nadir, Satrapi rallies. In a few heady rorism. …I know this image to be far from the truth. I the realism of her images. Situated in the interstices pages she goes from overdose to aerobics instructor to art believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the between the political and the personal, much of Persepolis’ school candidate—no mean feat given that 40% of all wrongdoings of a few extremists.’ potency derives from the disjunction between Satrapi’s university places are reserved for children of the martyrs Not surprisingly, Satrapi’s publisher L’Association plain, matter-of-fact descriptions and the often horrifi c and that any university entrant must fi rst pass a draconian endorsed her quest for wide exposure: even before publi- events depicted. Th us, by the time the fi rst book reaches ideological exam. cation, Persepolis was heavily marketed as the Franco-Ira- its shattering climax—the torture and execution of her Th e second half of Persepolis 2 is constantly back- nian answer to Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986). Unfortu- favourite uncle—so deliberately, brutally minimalist are grounded by political upheaval, and it is here, telling a nately, too many reviewers jumped on this bandwagon. Satrapi’s images that the inexpressibility of her grief is personal story with political incidentals, that her autobi- To compare a graphic memoir to Maus is to a young artist tangible to a wholly empathetic audience. ography is most compelling. During the early eighties, what it is to label a songwriter the new Dylan, and the the government had imprisoned and executed so many many critics who suggested as much do her a disservice. More retrospective and sage, book two features an older students that by 1990, even the most educated, satel- For one, the comparison is inapt. Perhaps because Satrapi Satrapi in place of the childlike narrator of the fi rst lite-TV-nourished young adults avoided overt political writes within the more mainstream French graphic books volume. Accordingly, although Persepolis 2 covers less demonstration. Revolution was relegated to the details: industry, the text has none of Maus’ artistic self-conscious- epic political events, it is more wry and, for its wisdom, It hinged on…showing your wrist, a loud laugh, ness, nor does it refl ect Maus’ questioning and subversion more touching. Sent to Vienna by parents worried about having a walkman… Th e regime had understood of memoir as authentic historical record. Moreover, while the increasing political tumult, it opens with fourteen- that one person leaving her house while asking Spiegelman uses the graphic format to build up intri- year-old Marjane newly-arrived at her Catholic boarding herself: ‘Are my trousers long enough?’ ‘Is my veil cate symbologies, Satrapi illustrates mostly at face value, house. Not surprisingly, her culture-shock is immense, in place?’ ‘Can my makeup be seen?’ no longer employing her illustrations more photographically than but Satrapi records it with customary irony (her comment asks herself: ‘Where is my freedom of speech?’ ‘My metaphorically. Yet though her work is not as self-aware, of, ‘It’s going to be cool to go to school without a veil, to life, is it liveable?’ ‘What’s going on in the political sweeping, or meticulous as Spiegelman’s, or even as Joe not have to beat oneself every day for the war martyrs,’ prisons?’ Sacco’s (author of Palestine, to whom she’s also been com- is countered by a vacuous cousin’s stare and the insight- Courtship itself becomes an act of rebellion: in a pared), it is still unfl inching and immensely poignant. ful retort of, ‘this is my raspberry-scented pen, but I have world of single-sex staircases (so men cannot watch wom- strawberry and blackberry ones, too’). en ascend), wearing the maghnaeh sexily becomes ‘a real Raised in a left-leaning and privileged family in Tehran, She has a keen eye for caricature, and some of her science—you learn how to fold it so that from the side no Satrapi’s autobiography begins in 1979 when, ‘after a long fi nest humour—as well as her most eff ective and subtle hair is visible but from the front small locks appear’. Th e sleep of 2500 years, the revolution has fi nally awakened political commentary—comes by deadpan depiction of conservatory too is a minefi eld: some of Satrapi’s most the people’. Her upbringing was, she acknowledges, the vapidity and absurdity of her European counterparts scathing sarcasm is justifi ably reserved for the hypocrisies far from commonplace: after being given a comic book (a direct parallel, she suggests, to the ignorance and inherent to an art institute run by a fundamentalist state. entitled Dialectical Materialism, her pre-adolescent self bluster informing much of Iranian culture). As a outsider, When presented with a (fully-clothed) male model, she’s dismisses a previous calling to prophecy and assumes the hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2 the Oxonian Review of books 7

chastised for looking at him directly; her incredulous query of, ‘Should I draw this man while looking at the door???!!’ is met by a terse, un-ironic, ‘Yes’. Similarly, after explaining the diffi culty of studying anatomy as modelled by a woman in a chador, she dryly concludes, ‘We nevertheless learned to draw drapes.’ Perhaps inevitably, a healthy underground culture arises amongst her college friends. Behind fi rmly closed doors, they pose for each other without inhibition; hid- den satellite dishes broadcast CNN; drinking, smoking, sex and (tragically) Bon Jovi are de rigueur. And while such minor licenses at times have devastating conse- quences—in three wordless pages of beautifully austere silhouettes, a friend falls to his death in a moonlit fl ight from police—the parallels she draws between her own life and her readers’ are apparent. Th e same vanities, the same insouciance. ‘Th e more time passed,’ she concludes with a newcomer’s relief, ‘the more I became conscious of the contrast between the offi cial representation of my country and the real life of the people, the one that went sympathy for the Kuwaitis, but I hate just as much Great gazes at the scene in comic despair, Satrapi bringing on behind the walls.’ the cynicism of the allies who call themselves history full circle with tongue-in-cheek wit. Clearly, she’s To that end, while Satrapi makes an eff ort to show ‘liberators’ while they’re there for the oil. still a patriot at heart: this incarnation of Iranian govern- most sides to an argument—once even depicting a mul- Cue visible fl inch. Surely if the redressing of balances is ance, she suggests repeatedly, is merely the latest in a lah sympathetically—for the most part hers is a narrative her goal, hard-hitting reportage—interviews with those cyclical history—there is something intrinsic to Iranian infused with disbelief, irony and rage both at those who who endured Iraq’s US-sponsored assault, or even the national character that withstands superfi cial ideologies. perpetuate Iran’s fundamentalism and at those who judge straightforward citation of statistics—would be more Th e ruins of Persepolis thus provide her with a perfect it from afar. Her refusal to mention any Ayatollah is a eff ective. Instead, Satrapi mounts the soapbox and damn metaphor: an icon intriguing to and beloved of the west- pointed act of resistance – although it restricts an already well pummels her point home.2 Th is occasional pedantic ern tourist, it is also a symbol of both imperial transience limited perspective and political salience – that echoes her streak is unfortunate, as the humour and frankness of her and the tenacity of Persian nationalism. opening plea for ‘an entire nation…[to] not be judged by story go much further towards humanising Iran. Ultimately, the graphic medium suits her purposes the wrongdoings of a few extremists’. Th is is obviously Fortunately, her illustrations amply compensate for well for several reasons: for one, her prose is neither fair, but were she to widen her scope to include informa- her prose’s heavy-handedness. Striking and brutal, her eloquent nor original enough to stand on its own. For tion about these extremists, who must surely number monochromatic, largely untextured images ably evoke another, the restrictions of her pared-down illustrations more than a ‘few’, it might make her account seem a bit the oppressiveness of the Islamic Republic and particu- suit the absolutes and ironies of both Iran and Europe, less one-sided and narrow without compromising her larly its strictures of attire (women are often reduced to and subtly draw parallels between the two that in straight politics too severely. silhouettes, opaque and anonymous). And yet out of text would lack nuance. Moreover, the graphic format these austere lines, she coaxes an extraordinary amount permits her to oscillate between journalistic realism and Had she stuck to straightforward memoir, it would have of facial expression: distinguishing from a morass of veils solipsistic whimsy far more than would a more traditional served her educational aims just as eff ectively. Unfortu- and shadow the shades of each character’s personality is autobiographical format. Finally, as she acknowledges, it nately, on the rare occasion when Satrapi does interrupt something Satrapi micromanages down to the dimple. renders the subject less serious, more sympathetic, more her autobiography with overt polemic, it typically takes Th ough her images tend more toward the literal accessible—all desirable traits for a woman seeking to the form of condescendingly didactic asides. Obviously than the metaphorical, Persepolis’ dream sequences and change the world’s mind. intended for myopic post-9/11 westerners, these elemen- moments of crisis (the onset of the Iran-Iraq war, her Of course, now, in 2005, her prefatory mission might tary history lessons have all of the realism of the Marx- departure from Tehran, the torture of her uncle) often seem a bit less urgent. Iranian/Western political rela- Descartes conversation in her Dialectical Materialism edge towards the jagged surrealism of French artist and tions are inching away from the messianic bellicosity of primer. Th e odd footnote is understandable, perhaps even acknowledged forebear David B. (Epileptic). On these Bush’s infamous ‘axis of evil’ speech and towards grudging useful (an asterisk at the bottom of a cell noting that ‘the occasions, Satrapi’s usually pared-down illustrations be- diplomacy, as in the case of the recent Nuclear Prolifera- term “mujahideen” isn’t specifi c to Afghanistan. It means come richly and widely allusive, pointedly commingling tion talks. And given Europe’s recent inundation by a combatant’); and the occasional lapse into clumsy plati- western tradition with two and half centuries of Persian Iranian cultural exports—the bestselling Reading Lolita in tude forgivable (‘besides, fear has always been a driving- culture. Th e pietà is invoked twice: once poignantly, Tehran, Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni, the widespread force behind all dictators’ repression’). But her already as her mother faints into her father’s arms as she boards acclaim of new fi lms by Kiarostami, Maghsoudlou, and clunky dialogue exacerbates such abrasive and unnatural the plane for Vienna, and once ironically, a woman in a Maryam Keshavarz—Satrapi’s zeal to introduce Iranian moralising—take, for example, the following assessment chador clutching a martyr in military uniform; many of counter-culture to the west might seem a bit overstated. cleverly camoufl aged by familial conversation: the textures of Achaemenian/Sasanian art reappear in the Nevertheless, her endemic humour, arresting illustration Marjane: Th e western media also fi ghts against us. background of dream sequences and epic histories; and and the comic-book format itself (‘People don’t take it Th at’s where our reputation as fundamentalists the Islamic crescent moon rises at her lowest points with so seriously,’ she admits) eff ectively off set the moralising and terrorists comes from! a sarcastic twinkle. Brilliantly, her single-cell delineation gravitas of her prologue. Certainly, Satrapi’s autobiogra- Mom: You’re right. Between one’s fanaticism and of ‘2500 years of tyranny and submission’ is rendered as phy is so likeable that despite a didactic strain it remains the other’s disdain, it’s hard to know which side to bas-relief pastiche, with Mongolian cavalry toe-to-heel an engaging, compelling read. While Persepolis’ feistiness choose. Personally, I hate Saddam and I have no with sunglass-clad Marxists and Uncle Sam. As Cyrus the and creativity pay tribute as much to Satrapi herself as to contemporary Iran, if her aim is to humanise her home- land, this amiable, sardonic and very candid memoir couldn’t do a better job.

Kristin Anderson is is an American DPhil student in English Literature at Exeter College.

Notes 1. Interview with Dave Welch, 17.9.2004 (http://www.powells.com/authors/satrapi.html). 2. Of course, if nuance and taste are so lacking in our own critical vocabulary that Persepolis is deemed a ‘styl- ish, clever and moving weapon of mass destruction’ by the Telegraph, perhaps Satrapi’s within her rights to under- estimate us. 8 the Oxonian Review of books hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2

When things go wrong in Libya

Anthony Ham explained the arrests. But by then the media had caught better typifi ed the diff erence between print and television Lonely Planet: Libya wind of the situation. Hundreds of children treated at journalists. ‘Maybe a coff ee? Here?’ I added hopefully. Lonely Planet Publications, 2002. Al-Fateh had been found to be HIV-infected, and dozens ‘Call me,’ he said, smiling as he pushed a card into my 264 pages were already suff ering AIDS-related illnesses. Zdravko hand and drove away. ISBN: 0864426992 and Kristiyana, along with fi ve other Bulgarian nurses A few days later, I met Deeb after work at about and a Palestinian doctor, were charged with deliberately 10pm. Although his English seemed excellent to me, he Libya Report 2004 injecting children with HIV-tainted blood to ‘undermine brought his brother Jamie, who had spent many years Amnesty International, the security of the State’, a crime that calls for the death in Canada, as a standby translator. Deeb was a natural London penalty.1 for television, with his neatly trimmed moustache and http://web.amnesty.org/re- Later the country’s long-time leader, Colonel Muam- wet-combed, senatorial hairstyle. He chose his words port2004/lby-summary-eng mar Gaddafi , announced that the virus had been specially very carefully and often relied on his brother, confi d- designed in a laboratory abroad and given to the med- ing at length in Arabic for an English output that often ics for experiments on the children. He suspected the amounted to a single sentence. involvement of the CIA or of Israel’s Mossad. Libyans I never achieved the warm rapport I was trying to rallied around this theory when three of the medics ad- build. Th e brothers preferred mineral water to my off er ‘Libya is the type of desert nation you thought only mitted to the crimes. Public opinion did not change after of the hotel’s thick Turkish coff ee. (Indeed, as Ham existed in the imagination.’ it came to light that the authorities had used torture and notes, because alcohol is illegal, ‘there’s not a lot of choice Anthony Ham rape to extract the ‘confessions’. When the Bulgarian em- when it comes to beverages’.) My opening move was bassy was allowed to visit the prison, some of the medics’ to ply Deeb with celebrity questions. ‘Have you had a ccording to the Lonely Planet guide to Libya, by health was visibly deteriorating. A doctor’s examination chance to meet the Leader?’ Prompting one of his brief AAnthony Ham, winter is ‘the most pleasant time to revealed the scars of torture, although his report was criti- smiles, Deeb rejoined, ‘We are on a fi rst-name basis’. As I visit’, and I agree. As I sat listening to Zdravko Georgiev cised in court for not following correct procedure. (Ac- quizzed him on his impressions of Western journalists in describe how he and his wife Kristiyana were tortured by cording to Amnesty, ‘human rights violations continue to Libya (‘quite friendly’) and whether he visited other coun- the Libyan police, I longed to open the window and let be widespread’, including the ‘arbitrary arrest’ of political tries (‘whenever Gaddafi travels’), the hotel’s two-metre in the cool breeze that blows off the Mediterranean in the opponents and ‘heretics’ who are ‘detained incommuni- wide television played non-stop Al-Jazeera. Th is was days evening. I felt claustrophobic, although the interview was cado for long periods without charge’, suff ering torture or before the tsunami struck the Indian Ocean and Ukrain- held in one of Tripoli’s ‘elegant white-washed’ buildings ‘unexplained death’ in prison.) ian presidential candidate Yushenko’s poison-marred face from the Italian colonial era, with their graciously high I shifted uncomfortably in my seat as Georgiev stared stared at me over Deeb’s shoulder amid Arabic commen- ceilings. at the fl oor. Compared to photographs I saw of him tary. I adore guidebooks. Not only do they give the travel- from a few years before, he seemed to have aged rapidly, Finally, I plunged in. ‘I met Zdravko Georgiev some ler practical information—which items to pack besides a his blue eyes trapped in a face of craggy, ashen rock. In days ago in the Bulgarian embassy.’ As if I had intoned passport, where to fi nd cheap lodging, how to say ‘please’, his broken English, he quietly recalled his fi rst year in a spell, Deeb underwent a dramatic transformation. what to do when the passport is stolen—these days they prison. His mouth suddenly went dry and I silently Where moments ago he had been the sleek, confi dent include essays on local history, politics, and culture that wished he would pause to drink from a glass of water on journalist, he now seemed lost and childlike. He fi dgeted make for good reading even at home. Secure at the top the low table between us. (Ham accurately notes that the and looked away anxiously as if needing the bathroom. of the heap is Lonely Planet, the world’s largest independ- tap water is safe but ‘tends to be salty and not particularly ‘Georgiev described things that happened to him in ent travel publisher, always striving to be the fi rst to stake pleasant’.) Although he had lost teeth from continual prison that shocked me,’ I said. As Deeb seemed to lose out virgin territory, excluding neither the unreachable beatings, he explained, this paled next to being kept in a interest in the conversation, his brother took over. We (Bhutan) nor the inadvisable (Iran). Anthony Ham has damp cage until his clothing rotted and his skin festered. spoke intensely, but without anger, about American placed another jewel in the Lonely Planet crown with I felt a stab of nausea when he looked up and said, ‘Th is imperialism and Middle Eastern politics. I sympathised his eloquent and detailed guide to Libya. Before Lonely was nothing, compared to what they did to my wife. on many points. Some assertions were hard to swallow, Planet came to the rescue, the only reliable overview of Th is was nothing’. such as his belief that Mossad had delivered ‘thousands the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya had and thousands of mice’ to destroy Libya’s agriculture. But been Amnesty International’s annual human rights report. § eventually I felt we had found some common ground. I Prospective tourists—expected to pour in now that sanc- interrupted Jamie at times to thank him for speaking so tions have been lifted—will be pleased by this alternative Unusual for the guidebook genre, the author of the frankly. ‘It’s no problem’, he assured me. to Amnesty’s dry prose. I was lucky to visit Libya as a Lonely Planet guide to Libya ventures a few of his own But I couldn’t let Deeb off the hook that easily, so I journalist in December 2004 and put Mr. Ham’s guide to political views. ‘Forget the myths about Libyan hostility asked him directly, ‘Do you think the Bulgarians were the test. to the outside world’, urges Ham. Th e reputation is un- tortured?’ Although ‘torture’ does not appear in the index of the fair, claims the Australian travel writer, because Libya has ‘Th ey are lying’, he responded tersely. Lonely Planet guide, nine pages are devoted to the coastal been ‘maligned by a myopic Western media as a pariah ‘How do you know?’ I asked, pressing on. ‘What town of Benghazi where Zdravko and Kristiyana were ar- state’. As a member of the Western media, this appraisal evidence have you seen that I haven’t?’ By then I had rested. Ham admits that Libya’s second largest city ‘lacks gave me pause. reviewed the case not only with the Libyan lawyer the obvious Mediterranean charm of Tripoli’, but says it Was I being prejudicial and short-sighted? Would representing the Bulgarians, but also with the Associa- is worth seeing ‘Freedom Square, one of Benghazi’s most my reporting amount to yet more Western distortion at tion of the Families, a group of relatives of the infected enchanting spots, particularly in the late afternoon when Libya’s expense? Taking Ham’s warning to heart, I did my Benghazi children. I spent hours with the Association’s Benghazi children play football’. Ham does not mention best to give each side equal time. Staying in the Al- spokesman, Ramadan Al-Faitore, who quit his job as an nearby Al-Fateh Children’s Hospital where, should the Kebir, one of Tripoli’s better hotels, proved to be a stroke engineer years ago to devote himself full-time to ‘fi ght- play become too rough, children can be delivered for care. of luck because it is the favourite haunt of Libya’s business ing the wrong idea that the Bulgarians are innocent’. Like most hospitals in the country, Al-Fateh is admin- and media personalities. (I also concur with Ham that He was only too eager to share incriminating evidence istered by Libyans but relies on many qualifi ed foreigners the view from the tenth fl oor is superb and the hotel’s with me, although much of it was diffi cult to believe, such as Kristiyana, a nurse, to keep it running due to the restaurant is ‘fl ash’.) particularly as there is far more convincing evidence to shortage of local expertise. Late at night on 9 Febru- Among the dozens of conversations I had with Liby- the contrary. (One of the most outstanding facts in the ary 1999, Kristiyana was among 23 Bulgarian medics ans about the Benghazi aff air, the most interesting was Bulgarian medics’ favour was the hospital’s own record pulled from their beds, forced into cars, and driven away with Khaled Deeb, the Libya correspondent for Al-Jazeera of when the HIV-infected children had been admitted. in blindfolds. Zdravko was working as a doctor in the television. I was walking by as his fi lm crew packed up According to the offi cial record, some children had been Sahara when he heard that his wife had disappeared. He after an interview in the Al-Kebir’s café. I introduced admitted for treatment before the accused had started to rushed to Benghazi and began visiting police stations myself and asked if he might have time to meet. Stand- work at the hospital. In one case, a child of HIV-negative for help. After several days, he too was arrested without ing together—me in t-shirt and jeans, Deeb in an parents had been born at the hospital—and had become explanation. immaculate, shimmering Italian suit—we couldn’t have infected—long after the Bulgarians had been arrested. Months passed before the Libyan authorities fully hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2 the Oxonian Review of books 9

‘Th ose records were wrong. We worked in Benghazi since 1995, have the real record’, Al-Faitore Zdravko Georgiev was given told me, pulling fi les from his only a four year suspended briefcase. Th eir version is very sentence and now lives inside similar to the offi cial record, the Bulgarian embassy. Libya’s although the dates of admis- highest court meets on 31 May sion for all the HIV-infected (recently postponed from the children now fall neatly within original date of 29 March) to the period of employment of announce their decision on the the accused. medics’ fi nal appeal, although Before Deeb left suddenly the Libyan government recently for ‘another meeting’, Libya’s said it might reconsider the case most respected journalist gave if compensation is paid—Al- his fi nal word on the matter. Faitore has suggested ten ‘I know they are lying because million euros for each of the I know 110% that they are 426 infected children—and if guilty. Why would my govern- Britain hands over the Libyan ment use torture to make them suspect in the Lockerbie bomb- say things if they are already ing. guilty?’ And with that, he was As a friendly taxi driver gone. Following Ham’s advice, whisked me away to the air- I left the waiter a tip of one port, I thought about Ham’s Libyan dinar. praise of Libyan ‘generosity and willingness to engage with the § peoples of the world’. Had he looked through the eyes of the ‘For those who’ve spent any country’s more regular visitors, time here, the friendliness and or had the opportunity to enjoy hospitality of the Libyan people some Libyan generosity involv- are likely to be their enduring ing electrical cable, Ham might memories’, says Ham, and I have included the amendment: can see how he reaches that ‘...as long as you’re white, and conclusion. Most Libyans I nothing goes wrong’. met—particularly taxi drivers, children, and hôteliers— But being white does not seem to guarantee hospi- seemed thrilled to meet me. But then again, Ham and tality at the hands of the Libyans. After examining the John Bohannon earned a DPhil in Molecular Biology from Balliol in 2002. He moved to Berlin as a Fulbright I are unusual visitors. Th e vast majority of non-Libyans Benghazi hospital, visiting the children, families, doctors, scholar last year. His articles on Libya can be found at: who spend any time here are sub-Saharan refugees or and nurses, a team of European AIDS experts concluded www.johnbohannon.org. migrant workers. I spent an afternoon with two brothers that hospital-wide ‘negligence’ was to blame rather than who, just a week after arriving in Tripoli from war-torn any deliberate action by the medics.2 Th e children had Liberia, had all their money taken by the police and were been vulnerable to contamination from each others’ stuff ed in a ‘stinking, packed cell like animals’ for months blood through many possible routes, including improper before release. (Th eir experience is not unusual according sterilization of instruments and the reuse of syringes. If to Amnesty’s report.) ‘But it’s getting better’, they said. anyone is to blame, said one of the scientists to me, ‘it is Until recently, ‘Libyans threw rocks at anyone black’. the Libyan Minister of Health’. Th e Libyan court considered this scientifi c appraisal “I know they are lying because I know 110% along with a counter-report written by fi ve Libyan doctors claiming instead that all signs pointed to Bulgar- Notes that they are guilty. Why would my govern- ian guilt. Although it was riddled with misunderstand- 1. Case 44/1999, People’s Prosecution Bureau, Great Socialist ings of basic molecular biology, the counter-report held People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. ment use torture to make them say things if 2. The report is under review for scientifi c publication in April sway in the view of the Libyan judges. On 6 May 2004, 2005. The principal author, Professor Vittorio Colizzi of they are already guilty?” the medics were found guilty and sentenced to death by Tor Vergata University in Rome, Italy, can be contacted at: fi ring squad. Perhaps in light of the fact that he had not [email protected].

Oxonianthe Review of books

Submission Procedures: Guidelines: Th ere are two ways to go about submitting to the Short reviews can range from as few as 400-850 words. the terms employed in a specifi c fi eld of discussion. In Oxonian Review. Th e simplest is to write a full draft Longer pieces are expected to be 1500-2500 words. We longer articles, a premium will be put on pieces that of your piece, and then submit. Th e second option will generally observe the stylistic conventions of major include a balanced, contextual discussion of the work is to propose a topic and then receive feedback from U.K. periodicals (e.g., the Times Literary Supplement). on the way to a well-articulated response. Neither a the editorial staff before the full article is written. All Poems and pieces of short fi ction will be judged on their full discussion nor a strong response should be missing. submissions should be e-mailed to the Senior Edi- individual merits. However, please remember that we tor. Submissions should be attached to the e-mail in have a limited number of pages, and longer pieces are Contact Us: Microsoft Word format, single-spaced. Indicate your less likely to be published. Keep in mind that we look for clarity and readability as well as depth and rigor. We Avery Willis Kris Anderson name, writing experience, and expertise in the subject, Editor-in-Chief Senior Editor as applicable. Also include details about the book(s) assume an intelligent, interested audience, capable of un- Balliol College Exeter College or event(s) discussed. derstanding a sustained discussion, but not familiar with [email protected] [email protected] 10 the Oxonian Review of books hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2

Once upon a time, and what happened next ... Philip Pullman at the Oxford Women’s Luncheon Club, Tuesday 8 February 2005

Philip Pullman, Oxford-based author of His Dark Materials trilogy, is the recipient of the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Children’s Book Award, and the Whit- bread Book of the Year Award for Th e Amber Spyglass (2001)—the fi rst time in the history of the prize that it has been bestowed upon a children’s book. A two-part dramatic adaptation of His Dark Materials, directed by Nicholas Hyntner, is currently running at the National Th eatre in London to widespread acclaim; the Lyric Th eatre’s adaptation of Th e Firework-Maker’s Daughter has just concluded a national tour; and New Line Cinemas is currently developing a fi lm adaptation of the trilogy. Th e speech below was originally presented to the Oxford Women’s Luncheon Club. We are pleased to publish it here in a slightly abridged form.

§

thought I’d talk a little today about stories, and about And so on. Get the main character on stage as soon as rub shoulders with the Prince of Wales. But they are more Imy approach to one particular aspect of storytelling. you can. Th is is a narrative technique that authors and comfortably off , shall we say, than most readers; they We all have such an appetite for narrative, for knowing fi lmmakers have borrowed from the anonymous tellers of don’t need to worry about paying the bills. Th at is the what happens next, and there’s an enormous amount we fairy tales and folk tales, whose names are lost for ever. sort of rich they are, which to most people is rich; so the can say about it. Christopher Booker has just brought out For example: the fi rst word of the most famous chil- narrator is assuming that most of her readers are not. a book called Th e Seven Basic Plots of Literature, which dren’s book of all is ‘Alice’. It goes on, if you remember, Th e fi rst six words of Emma tell us a great deal more is so heavy I dare not drop it on my foot. But I’m not ‘… was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister than they seem to, as long as we pay them the sort of at- an expert of that sort. I’m no literary critic. All I do is on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice tention that they deserve. write stories, but in the course of doing it for nearly forty she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but But the important thing as far as I’m concerned, is years I’ve thought a great deal about it, and learned a few it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is that, like Alice, like Middlemarch, like all those fairy tales, things, too. I thought that today I’d tell you a little about the use of a book”, thought Alice, “without pictures or Emma begins with the main character plumb square one small aspect of this business, this craft, this art. And conversations?”’ in front of us. Alfred Hitchcock said once that if a fi lm perhaps it’s the one that people who are interested in tell- So in the very fi rst sentence the character and her opens with a burglar breaking into an empty house, and ing stories are most concerned about, because it has to do situation are established for us. Something’s going to hap- we go with him up the stairs and into the bedroom and with the fear of the blank page that I know many would- pen—somehow, we can tell. then, as he’s ransacking the drawers, we see the lights of be writers feel. It’s the question of how you begin a story. If we take a book written with a rather more grown- a car coming up the drive, we think ‘Watch out! Th ey’re Where do you start? What’s the fi rst sentence? We all up audience in mind than Alice, namely Middlemarch coming!’ We’re not on the side of the innocent people know the phrase ‘Once upon a time’, the opening of a (and Virginia Woolf said that Middlemarch was ‘One of whose house is being burgled—we’re on the side of the thousand fairytales. When we hear that, we know what to the few English novels written for grown-up people’), burglar. Because the story is on the side of the burglar. All expect: we’re in a world where strange and fanciful things we fi nd this fi rst sentence: ‘Miss Brooke had that kind the interest, all the investment of attention and sympathy, can happen, where a princess can kiss a frog and turn him of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor are on the side of the person whose actions we’re watch- into a prince, where a curse can put a blight on a whole dress’. Miss Brooke, Dorothea, is of course the heroine of ing. My point is that one very good way, perhaps the country until a young hero comes along to lift it, where the story, whose impulsive high-mindedness will get her best way of all, of opening a story consists of putting the a handful of beans can turn into a magic ladder into the into all sorts of diffi culty as the story unfolds. And there main character and their situation right there in the fi rst sky. We wouldn’t expect the latest novel by Ian McEwan, she is, right in the fi rst two words of the story. sentence. Twelve years ago when I began to write a book or Anita Brookner, or (at the other end of the literary It’s interesting, though, to see the diff erence from which didn’t have a title at that stage, but which later scale) Danielle Steele, or the man who wrote Th e Da Vinci Alice. In the book intended for children, something’s became called Northern Lights, I did just that. Th e fi rst Code, to start with that phrase. Th ose writers all want to happening, or at least being impatiently hoped for. We’re sentence says: persuade us that the story they’re telling takes place in the right there on the riverbank with Alice, being bored, ‘Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darken- real world. When you say ‘Once upon a time’, that’s not and ready for a diversion. In Middlemarch, by contrast, ing Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of quite what you have in mind. there isn’t any action going on. Instead someone is being sight of the kitchen.’ And there are lots of equivalents for ‘Once upon described; we’re being invited to consider and refl ect. a time’. Th e great tale from the Brothers Grimm, Th e And in particular, Dorothea is being described in a way Th at tells us quite a lot. First it tells us that we’re focus- Juniper Tree, one of the most ferocious and beautiful and that tells us what the narrator thinks we’re like. She (I’m ing on someone called Lyra—an unusual name; and it terrifying stories ever told, begins ‘A long time ago, at calling the narrator she, but there’s no reason to assign a tells us, in the most matter-of-fact way, that this Lyra has least two thousand years …’ particular gender to the narrator just because the author a dæmon. Moreover, dæmon is spelt not like the word Setting a story ‘Once upon a time’, or ‘Two thousand happened to be female)—she assumes that we the readers demon that means devil, but with a ligature. So it doesn’t years ago’, or whenever, means (apart from other things) are worldly and intelligent and sophisticated enough to mean she’s got a personal devil; it means she’s accompa- that it’s safe from awkward fact-checking; it means we can invent whatever we like. We’re in a land where other rules apply, where we can expect things to be a bit diff erent Hitchcock said once that if a fi lm opens with a burglar breaking into an empty house, we’re from here. I once began a story of my own, ‘A thousand not on the side of the innocent people whose house is being burgled—we’re on the side of the miles ago, in a country east of the jungle and south of the mountains, there lived a fi rework-maker …’ And it burglar. was only natural for a story like that to contain a white elephant who could talk, and a dangerous visit to the fi re- fi end in his grotto on the volcano, and so on. know what she means by ‘that kind of beauty which is nied by another being, perhaps some kind of spirit, per- Once you’ve begun a story like this—‘Once upon thrown into relief by poor dress’. haps something else, and that this being is hers in some a time there was …’—it has a sort of momentum. You I’m not sure that I am, actually, but I’m fl attered by way—Lyra and her dæmon; and that might suggest the have to continue by saying more about the person or the the assumption. Th at sentence, as simple as it seems, tells old idea of a guardian angel, or a personal spirit guide. people you’ve just mentioned; because one thing all these us a great deal about what the book expects of us. (Th ose who’ve read about Socrates might remember that openings have in common is that they mention the main So does this opening, from Jane Austen: he referred to his own daimon.) In the meantime, there’s characters at once. Like these openings taken at random the rest of the sentence to think about. What are they ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, from Grimm and also from Italo Calvino’s (literally) won- doing? Th ey’re moving through a hall—capital H, like the with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, derful collection of Italian folktales: Hall of an Oxford college—which is getting darker, so seemed to unite some of the best blessings of exist- it’s late afternoon or early evening, when college servants Th ere was once a wizard who liked to disguise him- ence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the are occupied in getting dinner ready. And we can tell that self as a poor man … world with very little to distress or vex her’. Lyra shouldn’t be there, because she’s keeping to one side, Th ere was once a young hunter … Again, we’re opening with description, not with action. out of sight of the kitchen. If someone sees her, they’ll tell Th ere were once two brothers, one rich and the And again we’re expected to be on our toes. We’re expect- her off , perhaps, or chase her out. other poor … ed to know and to notice the diff erence between hand- So Lyra is our burglar, in the Hitchcock sense. She’s Th ere was once a poor man who had three sons … some, as an adjective for a woman, and, say, pretty; and the doing something she shouldn’t, but we don’t want her to Th ere were once twelve brothers who fell out with same goes for the diff erence between clever and, say, wise. get caught. And when she goes into the Retiring Room their father … As for rich —Emma and her father Mr Woodhouse don’t (I could have said Senior Common Room, but this is hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2 the Oxonian Review of books 11

So that’s what happens. As soon as Lyra appears, the advantages in this as well as legal ones: the characters have readers know where they are, and where the sympathy of to grow and develop through a number of complex and the story lies. Lyra has been their eyes and ears and mind diffi cult emotional adventures, and there are some things all the way through the fi rst book: what, they are longing that only a trained actor, with the physical stamina of an to know, does she make of this boy from our world? Will adult, can manage to convey. she like him? Will she trust him? How will they get on? But it does involve a suspension of disbelief. All thea- Well, Lyra has a way of fi nding things out. She has tre does anyway, of course, but would this be too much? her alethiometer, her truth-telling golden compass, which And here I come back to the subject I began with, she has learned how to read by manipulating the hands the opening business, because Nicholas Wright solved it that point to symbols around the edge. So as soon as Will all with one brilliant stroke—and he did it by looking is asleep, this happens: at the ending. Th e story ends with Lyra and Will, who Lyra carefully set the hands of the alethiometer, and have fallen in love, saying goodbye in the Oxford Botanic relaxed her mind into the shape of a question. Th e Garden, because they must part for ever. But they make a needle began to sweep around the dial in a series of promise to each other. Th ere’s an Oxford with a Botanic pauses and swings almost too fast to watch. Garden in Lyra’s world, as there is in Will’s, and they ‘She had asked: What is he? A friend or an enemy? agree that for the rest of their lives they’ll come to the Bo- tanic Garden on midsummer’s day and sit on the bench, ‘Th e alethiometer answered: He is a murderer. each in their diff erent world, and be together, although ‘When she saw the answer, she relaxed at once. Th is they’re far apart. boy could fi nd food and show her how to reach So Nicholas Wright opens the play with a twenty-year Oxford, and those were powers that were useful, old Lyra and Will sitting and talking under a tree, appar- but he might still have been untrustworthy or cow- ently to each other, but—as we soon see—not together ardly. A murderer was a worthy companion. She at all, but in diff erent worlds. Young adult actors playing felt as safe with him as she’d felt with Iorek Byrni- young adults. And of course they reminisce; and as they son, the armoured bear. do, they slip into their childhood selves and begin to tell their story … and we’re convinced. Th e whole play is, And so ends the fi rst chapter of Th e Subtle Knife. I technically, a fl ashback. But we accept the adults play- thought the story was safe at that point; I thought the ing children because we’ve already seen them as adults, readers would stay with it. And so they did. and we know what they’re doing—and also, by the way, I won’t go through the opening of the third volume, because they’re very fi ne actors. Th e Amber Spyglass, but I will say just a word about the Incidentally, Nick Wright made one vast improve- When you write a book you can decide these end. Th is is a very long story, which took me seven years ment on my story. I had the two of them meeting every to write but a lifetime to get ready to write, and one of things; I mean it’s up to you how you open year at midday; he makes it midnight. Much better. the very fi rst things I knew about it was the setting and Moonlight, a nightingale, no-one else around: much and close a story. All the responsibility is the mood of the fi nal few paragraphs. I didn’t know what more romantic. I wish I’d thought of that. would lead up to it—the 1300 pages in between the yours, and you can take all the credit. But when we get to the end of the play and fi nd fi rst sentence and the fi nal page were a total mystery to ourselves at the place where we began, and knowing now me—but the feeling of that fi nal page was crystal clear. It what long journey has brought these two young people to another universe we’re in, if we haven’t already guessed had the sort of intensity you feel when you wake up from this place and this time, it does work very well. that from the dæmon)—when she goes in there to look a very moving dream. It’s almost impossible to tell people And perhaps there’s something there for anyone around, which is very much against the rules, we’re about your dreams, because when you begin to relate who’s not sure how to begin a story. If ‘once upon a time’ already on her side, because of the way stories work. So them they sound so absurd or so banal; but you know the doesn’t help, try starting at the end: you know the other when someone comes in and she has to hide, we don’t sort of dream you have once a decade, perhaps, a dream formula that we associate with fairy tales. ‘And they lived want them to fi nd her. I think it must be a pretty rare so beautiful and so moving you never forget it as long as happily ever after’ is seldom, as we all know, true. Perhaps reader who disapproves of her actions, and really wants you live. My feeling about the fi nal pages was like that. it would be interesting to start there and see what hap- the Butler and the Master of the College, who come in Th ere was a garden, and it was midnight, and Lyra was pens to that happiness. unexpectedly, to catch her and box her ears and send her alone. Or alone with her dæmon. And actually that’s a very good way to start a story. If out. Th ere wouldn’t have been much of a story if they So that’s where it was all leading up to. And just as the everybody’s kind and everything goes right and everyone had, after all. fi rst word of the story was Lyra, so is the last. is happy, there is very little to tell. Much better to have So off the story goes. When you write a book you can decide these things; something going wrong—some little thing—some tiny His Dark Materials, of which Northern Lights is the I mean it’s up to you how you open and close a story. All fl aw, hardly suspected, hardly visible … A moment of fi rst part, occupies three volumes. In the fi rst part, our the responsibility is yours, and you can take all the credit. temptation, a hint of weakness, just a shade of too much focus is Lyra, although the narrator directs his attention But when that story is adapted for another medium, for satisfaction with being handsome and clever and rich … (I’m calling the narrator he, but there’s no reason to assign the stage or the screen, someone else comes in and starts and off we go. a particular gender to the narrator just because the author deciding things, and telling the story in a diff erent way. But that’s another story. happened to be male)—although the narrator occasion- I’ll just say a brief word about the stage adaptation of ally directs his attention away from Lyra and towards His Dark Materials, because I think it’s been adapted very other characters. well, and because it has a strong bearing on this opening In the second book, a new character comes in. He’s business. Th e adaptation was made by the playwright very important: so important that the second book, Th e Nicholas Wright and was directed by Nicholas Hytner, Subtle Knife, starts with his name, just as the fi rst book and it had a very successful run last winter. It is now the starts with Lyra’s. Th e fi rst sentence reads: ‘Will tugged at pretty well sold out for the whole of this run, so they his mother’s hand and said “Come on, come on …”’ must be doing something right. Actually, I think they are Oxonian Review Th is was going to be a diffi cult thing to spring on my doing a lot of things right. of books readers. Th ey’ve never seen Will before, never heard of And this illustrates how a lot of things all have a bear- him, never dreamed that he could exist. Suddenly there’s ing on each other, and determine how you have to tell a a new character, and what’s more, he hasn’t got a dæmon. story. After spending all of the fi rst book in Lyra’s world, and In the fi rst place, they wanted to make the story into getting used to everyone having a dæmon, here we are two full-length plays, which would play separately on in another world where, of all strange and bizarre things, some nights, but twice a week they’d do both plays in one people don’t have dæmons. In fact, it’s a world very like day. Th at’s six hours on the stage. In the second place, subscribe. our world. In fact—good grief!—it IS our world. the actress paying Lyra is obviously central: she has to be Now what I had to do with the opening of Th e Subtle there onstage a great deal of the time. It’s her story. In the Knife, having established Will, was get him out of his third place, there are laws about the employment of child world—our world—as quickly as possible, and have him actors, saying how many hours they’re allowed to work, meet Lyra. It had to happen in the fi rst chapter. Th ey’d and so on. Want to subscribe? Email: give me the benefi t of the doubt for about that long. I So it was clear from very early on that Lyra, and Will [email protected] reckoned if I got Will to Lyra in the fi rst twenty pages or too, although they’re about twelve years old in the story, so, the readers would stay with me. would have to be played by adults. Th ere are artistic 12 the Oxonian Review of books hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2

Fighting for recognition Stevie Smith in combat

ow far is reclamation the business of literary its heroine into a secret spy, whilst Th e Holiday (1949) is Romana Huk criticism? Romana Huk’s new book on Stevie a self-proclaimed portrait of the ‘post-war’ climate. Yet Stevie Smith: Between the Lines H Palgrave, 2004. Smith (1902-1971), the still underrated British poet and Smith remains apparently uncommitted to the political 344 pages novelist tries, for many of its three-hundred-plus pages seriousness suggested by a brief outline of her novels. Th e ISBN: 033354997X to attempt exactly that: to reclaim or, more accurately, Holiday was in fact composed during the war, but, owing to proclaim, the deceptive complexity of an author still to publishing diffi culties at the time, later simply updated best remembered for her mannered poetry readings, her by Smith by adding ‘post’ to each mention of it in her much-anthologised ‘Not Waving But Drowning’, or the text. Th is is an act that, for Huk, becomes problematic oddly intransigent drawings that accompanied much of in her determination to fi nd in Smith a deliberate social her work. Stevie Smith, who inspired a play of her life commentator. Huk attributes Smith’s actions to ‘the and two biographies before academic criticism saw fi t to prompting of her publishers, who argued that though the assess her, is perhaps, for British readers, still irrevocably novel was written during the war…its failure to fi nd the tied up with the myth of the English eccentric; we see her light of day until 1949 meant that it must be updated to dressed in her childlike Victorian costumes haunting the the post-war period.’ reaches of outer London suburbia. How apt then, that Yet Smith’s transgression in slipping between wartime this vigorous plea to take her work seriously comes from and peacetime through the addition of ‘post’ suggests own self-positioning as a war commentator in the 1930s the pen of an American academic. more than an over-subservience to her publisher. Does it and 40s, however oblique that commentary was, surely Many reasons can explain the ham-fi sted entrance of point us once again to Smith the artless trickster, an au- says as much about Smith’s own desire to attain the posi- Smith into the literary academy. Her work is dense and thor of contingency, or to a deeply complex writer whose tion of the political writer, to become the Dostoevsky allusive, and yet her poetry often borders on the facile. casual adaptation of her own novel’s setting from war to whom she so admired, as it does about our desire to She was a fi ercely proud writer who always insisted on post-war points up the limitations of language in tracking reclaim her as one. her own integrity, and yet throughout her work we fi nd such an ideological shift from confl ict to peace? What Th e conclusion to Huk’s dazzlingly intelligent read- the equivalent of the authorial shoulder-shrug, the sense might it mean to call somebody like Stevie Smith a war ing of Stevie Smith’s work seems particularly apt in this of the writer making it up as they go along. Th e act of writer? How important is the political in our engagement context. In the fi nal sentences, Huk draws comparisons reading her work is often an exercise in baffl ement—her with literature? Or, to articulate the question that Huk’s between Smith’s historical-political context and the use of simple ballads and fairy tale scenarios, particularly book often seems to dodge, what constitutes a serious current world situation—Smith’s ominous promise that in her later poems, only emphasises the divide between writer? ‘we shall kill everybody’ in her poem ‘How do you see?’ our familiarity with the raw materials of her work and Th eodor Adorno, the writer and cultural theorist becomes a prophetic warning of the war on terror. It is our uncertainty as to what she has created with them. whose shadow hangs over much of this book, notoriously almost as if, having apparently argued for the effi cacy of Stevie Smith also adopted a number of guises through- questioned the effi cacy of lyric poetry after Auschwitz. Smith as a war writer for the full length of the book, Huk out her career; from the 1930s modernist novelist whose Given the recent Auschwitz memorial, it seems pertinent was, after all, only seeking to reclaim an author with a fi rst published work, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), was that I am reviewing a book that argues for the less-quoted continuing relevance—the context of war simply being mistakenly attributed to Virginia Woolf, to the 1960s performance poet who took the stage along with Roger McGough and Michael Horovitz. Academia likes its The act of reading her work is often an exercise in baffl ement—her use of simple ballads and subjects malleable but not slippery, and attempts to read fairy tale scenarios, particularly in her later poems, only emphasises the divide between our her in any sharply defi ned context often tend to unravel before they have begun. Feminists, too, have been wary familiarity with the raw materials of her work and our uncertainty as to what she has created about trying to accommodate an author who scorns with them. the idea of a women’s poetry anthology, and who calls the battle of the sexes an ‘ancient’ and, one infers, tired debate. Similarly, Smith’s work fi ghts shy of a popular conclusion of Adorno’s tenet; any post-war literature is the most contemporary one in which to situate her work. following; although her work inspires cultish websites by necessity a product and, in part, a reaction to that war. Huk, in eff ect, is attempting to reframe our understand- and her poetry is still widely anthologised, her collected Several times while reading Between the Lines I was re- ing of Smith’s writing in much the same way that Smith works have remained stubbornly out of print for nearly minded of Dylan Th omas’s assertion in 1934 that ‘artists herself attempted throughout her career. ten years. Th ere seems, then, an unevenness in the way have set out, however unconsciously, to prove one of two Unfortunately, our passage through Huk’s book, general readers and academics might approach her oeuvre. things: either that they are mad in a sane world, or that extremely learned and well-researched though it is, is not To balance out this unsteady reputation, Huk’s book they are sane in a mad world’.1 Huk, who suggests that made easier by her own style, which cumbersomely piles tries to do two things at once: to make Stevie Smith not Smith’s protagonists are undergoing Freud’s talking cure up clause after sub-clause. With such complex mate- only a complex writer, but also a serious one. Th e two through the process of narrating their own texts, argues it rial (and treatment) as this, a reader needs more than an attributes are not as compatible as they might seem at both ways: the characters that people Stevie Smith’s novels overuse of italics to navigate their way through the book’s fi rst glance. To acknowledge the diffi culty and contradic- and poems are deemed mad in their world of seeming argument. However, if Huk’s convoluted but innova- tions in Smith’s work is often simply to read her as the sanity but, in fact, are the only ones attempting to cure tive reading of Stevie Smith leaves us longing to return artless joker, whereas to focus on her work as one serious their society’s collective political amnesia. to the less leaden rhythms of Smith herself, a re-read of ‘project’ often shuts down the complicated cross- Yet Huk’s book perhaps shares some of that amne- poems such as ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ and ‘Th e Frog currents to be found in her prose and poems. But this sia, despite its promises to give us a political reading of Prince’ may no longer provide us with the soothing tonic word ‘project’ is one to which Huk often returns. She Smith’s work. It seems happier to repeatedly situate her we anticipated. Huk’s Smith is then undoubtedly serious, absorbs Stevie Smith’s corpus, her three novels and her within a cultural context of Heidegger and Hegel than perhaps too serious; but as for complexity, it is primarily numerous poetry collections, into one ‘cultural project’. to explore the often very interesting questions Huk’s ap- the critic’s muddling voice that confuses the diffi cult What makes this book’s argument so interesting is the proach raises about what a ‘war writer’ might in fact be. material it attempts to elucidate. nature of the ‘project’ Huk has assigned to her: Stevie Huk only off ers us the equivocal argument that ‘indeed, Smith, whose popularity was at its height by her death in at least in some respects, it would not be wrong to think Will May is a DPhil student in English literature at Balliol College. 1971, becomes a war writer. of Smith as being, broadly defi ned, a “war poet”’. In His thesis examines authorial self-construction in the work of Stevie Smith. As Huk points out, Stevie Smith’s three novels, Huk’s bid to make a serious Smith, we lose any sense of published in 1936, 1938, and 1949 (before, during, and how she might have taken up and abandoned this mantle after, as Huk neatly surmises) are all explicitly concerned for her own reasons. Why, for example, did Stevie Smith with the factors that lead to war. Novel on Yellow Pa- often dismiss her wartime novels in the fi nal twenty per (1936) draws links between the growing climate of years of her writing career? How did her alertness to the Notes hatred in Germany and the ‘acceptable’ anti-Semitism printed propaganda of the day relate to her own preoc- 1. Dylan Thomas Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferris (London, 1985), of pre-war Britain, Over the Frontier (1938) transforms cupation with shaping an audience for her work? Smith’s 90. hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2 the Oxonian Review of books 13

Re-writing the score

t one point during a fi lm series he made in the of the roots of Gould’s ideas and aesthetic in his own Kevin Bazzana 1970s entitled ‘Th e Alchemist’, Glenn Gould turns personality and upbringing. Th is was the time of Toronto Wondrous Strange: The Life and A Art of Glenn Gould to his interviewer, Bruno Monsaingeon, and asks: ‘You the Good, ‘an excellent town to mind one’s own business Yale University Press, 2004. know who my favourite composer is? Guess: …one, two, in’ as Northrop Frye quipped, and while blandly provin- 528 pages three—Orlando Gibbons’. It is a typically Gouldian com- cial, it was also perfectly suited to an artist such as Gould, ISBN: 0300103743 ment—quirky, puritan, delivered with a cheeky twinkle who coupled a heroic creative ego with a defensive need in the eye—but one he was quick to defend: ‘Th e thing to shelter himself from that of others. He had an almost about Gibbons is that he is not a completely individual Beethovenian temper (itself tempered by a Presbyterian composer; he sort of straddles the era of delicious ano- docility) and for all his advocacy of reason and restraint, nymity that the pre-Renaissance knew about and were this was always in quiet counterpoint with great reserves exploring, and the era of, really, almost total, exploitative, of feeling. In performance, this manifested itself in inter- individuality of the Baroque […] but I love fi n de siècle pretations that were at once architecturally watertight and characters’. lushly Romantic, in ethos as well as in local felicities of Anonymity, delicious or otherwise, is not a quality rhythm and texture. In Gould, perhaps, post-modernism by the assumption that (as Alan Sinfi eld once put it) one readily associates with Gould. Personally eccentric and Romanticism had their belated union. homosexuality, ‘like murder, will out’. A study by Kevin and artistically subversive, he has become the subject of Nonetheless, Gould indulged in liberties with his Kopelson published in 1996 even ventured to describe a critical biographical literature that expands with all the chosen scores that had little in common with the free play him as ‘a touchstone of queer pianism’ (something in his elasticity and seriousness of bubblegum. He has been of a subjective will and intelligence conceived by Barthes touch?). In line with the humanizing, contextualizing referred to on ‘Th e Simpsons’; his recordings have been and other poststructuralists as the model of interpreta- impulse of his book, Bazzana puts paid to these strikingly sent into space; Hannibal Lector had him as his pianist of tion; Gould’s approach was one of re-composition rather conservative improprieties with an admirable blend of choice. ‘ARTIST, PHILOSOPHER, MADMAN, GEN- than activation (though as a composer in his own right, erudition and tact. In fact, Gould did have several aff airs IUS’ rang out the advertisements for ‘Th irty Two Short he had everything but talent). Th e barely latent pun in with women (naming no names), including one that Films About Glenn Gould’. Th e tattered papers held at ‘Th e Alchemist’ was irresistible: he turned everything he lasted for several years; but the war between artistic isola- the National Library played into pure Gould. tion and the desire for interpersonal contact was never of Canada are a sorry What he shared with more sharply felt than in his personal life. In the end, it testimony to the snatch- He has been referred to on ‘The Simpsons’; his both Romantic creativity seems, art triumphed over love, but he continued to have ing hands of the Gould recordings have been sent into space; Hannibal and post-modern jouis- close friendships—he adored the telephone—and was industry. Th e more we sance was a supra-indi- by all accounts a gentleman with a wonderfully silly and write, it seems, the less Lector had him as his pianist of choice. vidualistic aesthetic that self-defl ating sense of humour that belied his occasional we know. was ultimately theo- pomposity. One might expect logical in outlook. For Th ere are many more facets to Gould’s character eluci- a new biography to be attuned to these dangers, and, Gould, a self-regulating theist, art was an instrument of dated in this splendidly researched and engagingly written in Wondrous Strange: Th e Life and Art of Glenn Gould, salvation that always pointed beyond the printed notes on biography: his love of nature, his bad driving, and not Bazzana makes his position clear from the start: ‘…today the page, and it was a belief he proselytised with all the least his legendary hypochondria. Th e anecdotes con- no one comes to Gould’s work except through a haze of fervour of a convert (books found in his collection after tained here are abundant and the portrait it paints is rich, posthumous glorifi cation’, he argues, shrewdly scanning he died included An Argument for Evangelism through Your I particularly enjoyed the story of Gould driving around the critical horizon. It is a brave as well as dangerous ad- Vocation). Times Square, wearing blinkers to avoid the neon glare mission, since any work on the subject is at risk not only So much for debunking the myth. Glenn the Saint, of billboards, the solicitations of streetwalkers and all the of swelling an already bloated market, but of contributing the mystical seer, is also the Gould of legend. Th e ongo- other vitals of modern city life—certainly an apt image. to the combination of eulogy and snide gossip that has ing struggle for commentators has been to fi nd a way to But it is by resisting the implied imperative of his Shake- proliferated so luxuriantly since Gould’s arrival on the reconcile the clandestine and ascetic public persona with spearean epigraph (‘How shall we fi nd the concord of international scene in 1956. What more is there to say? a less lofty but equally vital sexual identity. Th is tension this discord?’) and by not trying to produce a view of its Plenty, in Bazzana’s estimation. Th e tone of his book is has been to the disadvantage of neither Gould nor his subject that is permanent and comprehensive, that Kevin both good-humoured and refreshingly irreverent as he at- record company: when his two Goldberg recordings were Bazzana displays a spirit both adventurous and cannily tempts to unpick the myth and unpack the reality of this repackaged in 2002 as ‘Glenn Gould: A State of Wonder’ Gouldian. Wondrous Strange cannot solve the mysteries of most elusive (and reclusive) of fi gures. (it was a bestseller), the front cover pictured the musician a complex and fascinating personality, but it can equip us Gould’s character oscillated between a winning charm writhing, tie undone, in a state of slack-jawed ecstasy to read the patterns of his behaviour and thought, and as and familiarity and a guarded isolationism. Th ere was no that invited wonder as much at the goings-on beneath such, it matches its title: wondrous strange indeed. contradiction here: his encounters with the outside world the piano lid as at the playing. With his doe-eyed good Ditlev Rindom is an undergraduate in English Literature at Magdalen always took place on his own, meticulously prepared, looks, impeccable discretion and limpid musicianship, he College. He studies medieval literature and is a student of John terms. Like Gibbons, he saw himself as in part removed could not avoid speculation and rumour, usually directed Barstow, Senior Professor of Piano at the Royal College of Music. from the Zeitgeist—while scrupulously modern in his ideas, he was peculiarly old-fashioned in his values. His increasingly eccentric interpretations were a series of the negotiations, sometimes confrontations, between his own aesthetic sensibility and those of his chosen com- Oxonian Review posers. Admiration was not a prerequisite of interest. of books He liked to quote Cage’s ideas on the creative role of about us: the perceiver and welcomed the destabilisation of the Th e Oxonian Review of Books was founded in 2001 University members. hierarchy of composer, performer and listener off ered by and remains Oxford’s only interdisciplinary postgradu- We welcome reviews of recently published work the technological age: ‘Dial twiddling is in its limited way ate publication. Its purpose is to stimulate intellectual in any fi eld (literature, politics, science, and the arts); an interpretative act’, he once remarked. It is tempting discourse and to off er students an opportunity to intro- original poetry or short fi ction; and drawings, photo- to make the connection between Gould’s thought and duce opinion into a public forum. Th e Oxonian Review graphs, cartoons or other artwork amenable to black- that of nouvelle critique, with its dismissal of tradition of Books features reviews of recently published books and-white publication. Reviewed work—which can and the monopolisation of meaning; it is an elision that in literature, politics, science, and the arts; original include books, fi lms, exhibitions, or other events of Bazzana proposes throughout this hefty volume. Indeed, poetry or short fi ction; and drawings, cartoons, or other interest—should have been published, exhibited, one of the consistent pleasures of this book, alongside its artwork amenable to print publication. It is published or performed in most cases within the last year. We colloquial even-handedness (‘It was true; he was a queer exclusively by graduate members of the University of welcome both brief write-ups and more substantial duck’), is the way that the author counterbalances an Oxford although it welcomes contributions from other commentary and review. analysis of post-modern discourses with an exploration 14 the Oxonian Review of books hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2

Prime obsession Bernhard Riemann and the greatest unsolved puzzle in mathematics

John Derbyshire earlier work. that the number of prime numbers less than any number Prime Obsession: Bernhard Th e chapters of the book alternate between mathe- x is accurately approximated by x/ln x, and the zeta func- Riemann and the greatest un- solved puzzle in mathematics matical expositions and broad historical accounts. While tion. Th us equipped, the reader understands for the fi rst Joseph Henry Press, 2003. this may invite the reader who is not interested in mathe- time why the Riemann hypothesis is of theoretical impor- 448 pages matical intricacies to skip the technical chapters, this is by tance in number theory specifi cally and in mathematics as ISBN: 0309085497 no means recommended: not only does the line between a whole. Th e last two chapters are mathematically much purely technical and historical accounts blur, especially in more demanding than the preceding ones, which might later chapters, but the reader will only gain a full appre- explain why Derbyshire has been holding them back for ciation of the historical facts with an understanding of the so long. While intensive, however, in the end these tech- basic mathematical results that are underpinning the his- nical chapters give an accessible and interesting overview torical development. Th e book is aimed at a ‘curious but of the theory underlying the Riemann Hypothesis. nonmathematical’ audience; however, my feeling is that Although the thematic and chronological centre of some of the later chapters might be a bit too diffi cult to the book is Riemann’s 1859 paper, the historical horizon grasp for a reader only fulfi lling these minimum require- stretches far beyond the nineteenth century. In an order ments. Moreover, the author’s claim, that the Riemann that is neither chronological nor terribly thematic, Derby- Hypothesis cannot be explained using mathematics more shire zigzags through centuries of mathematical thought, athematics and mathematicians have featured elementary than used in his book, could potentially face employing a recipe that too often seems to consist of Mprominently in Hollywood in recent years. How- some opposition from authors such as Marcus de Sautoy overly familiar ingredients. Th e main theme here is the ever, behind the veneer of scrawled equations, whose and Karl Sabbagh who have recently published books on nutty professor cliché supported by a rosary of anecdotes. logical fl aws everyone with a half-knowledge of math- the Riemann Hypothesis that seem to get by with almost He quotes, for example, from a list of New Year wishes ematics will easily detect, there is little to discover. Films no mathematics at all. of G.H. Hardy, a British mathematician active at the such as Good Will Hunting, Pi or A Beautiful Mind stay Th e thematic centre of Derbyshire’s exploration beginning of the last century, which (naturally) includes well within the boundaries of their respective genres and is Riemann’s 1859 paper, ‘On the number of prime proving the Riemann Hypothesis, but which also includes are more occupied with endorsing familiar clichés about numbers less than a given number’, which he presented disproving the existence of God and murdering Musso- mathematicians than with scientifi c content. at the Berlin Academy at the age of 33. Th roughout the lini. While these anecdotes spice up a text which could On the other end of the spectrum, there has lately book, Derbyshire refers to the results of this paper and to otherwise seem overinfused with mathematical intricacies, been a more serious rise in public interest in mathemat- the hypothesis presented therein, but it is not until the they also seem to be too obvious and self-consciously ics. Th is might have been sparked by recent advances: penultimate chapter, however, that the reader gets an idea inserted to eff ectively strike a balance between the techni- only in 1994 did Andrew Weil prove Fermat’s Last of the full consequences of Riemann’s work. cal expositions and historical accounts. Indeed, more Th eorem, the famous conjecture that there are no whole- Th e book begins with an introduction to analysis, often than not the reader gets the impression that the sole number solutions to the equation xn + yn = zn (when ‘n’ the discipline of mathematical thought that is concerned raison d’être for these historical interludes is to make the is a whole positive number greater than two). Th e proof with the study of limits particularly of infi nite sequences. whole text more digestible and, possibly, more market- of this theorem took the academic community 357 years able. to achieve, spawned entire new areas of mathematics Prime Obsession would have greatly benefi tted from and made Weil the superstar of mathematics when he Recent high-profi le advances have inspired a a tighter integration of the non-technical sections and published his fi nal result in 1994. Other equally diffi cult new generation of authors to do what math- mathematics as the alternation of technical and historical problems have received similarly widespread attention: chapters often seems artifi cial and at times impedes the the Four Colour Th eorem (that four colours are suffi cient ematicians are notoriously poor at doing: de- fl ow of the narrative. On the other hand, it is exactly one to colour any map in the plane, no two adjacent regions scribing complex matters in simple terms. of the strengths of Derbyshire’s book to bring mathe- having the same colour), which was proved in 1976 using matics into the historical context, and on the whole, no fewer than 1,200 hours of computer time; and Gold- he might be forgiven for sticking a bit too closely to bach’s conjecture (every whole number greater than two is his recipe. Certainly, the reason why Derbyshire’s book the sum of two primes), which remains unproven. Such Th e author then delineates some ideas of number theory, does ultimately prove valuable is precisely because of his recent high-profi le advances have subsequently inspired in particular the prime number theorem (PNT) which convincing integration of challenging mathematic theory a new generation of authors who are trying to do what gives an estimate of how many prime numbers exist with with its cultural context, despite his failure to balance mathematicians are notoriously poor at doing: describing a value lesser than a given number N, assuming that N them quite as eff ectively and gracefully as he might. complex matters in simple terms. Th ere are now popular is a large number. While the reader is now familiar with books on Abel’s theorem, on Euler’s constant gamma the two strands of mathematics that Riemann success- Florian Huehne is a German DPhil student in Maths (with an and several on the Riemann Hypothesis. Of these, the fully merged in his famous paper—analysis, and number emphasis on fi nancial maths) at Exeter College. lattermost presents the most signifi cant challenge for theory (i.e. the study of the properties of integers) —it re- the popular maths writer. Th e Riemann Hypothesis is a mains unclear until much later in the book, how the two conjecture stating that in all the interesting places where interact. Th e technical chapters that follow are devoted to the zeta-function is zero, its argument has a real compo- the analysis of the zeta function using the simple analytic nent of 1/2. As a theory, it is not only diffi cult to state in tools that were given in the beginning of the book. Rie- simple terms, but has proven to be more elusive to solve mann took the zeta function, which had been studied by than many long-standing problems believed to be of simi- many previous mathematicians, and showed how to think lar diffi culty. Over the years the proof of the hypothesis of it as a complex function. Th is extended, ‘complex’ zeta has become an end in itself despite the fact that its proof function, referred to as the Riemann zeta function, takes Want to advertise with would have practical repercussions in mathematics, phys- the value zero at even negative numbers (the so-called ics and cryptography. trivial zeros). Riemann’s hypothesis states that it also takes the Fortunately, John Derbyshire belongs to the breed zeros on the critical line, a line of complex numbers with of authors capable of putting complicated matters into real part 1/2. oxonian review simple words without overly diluting his subject matter. In order to explain these concepts in greater depth, of books A mathematician and linguist by training, he has come Derbyshire then introduces basic ideas of function theory to some fame as the author of Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a and algebraic concepts such as fi elds. Mercifully for the Dream, a 1996 novel about a Chinese immigrant coming lay reader, he diverts from this technical exposition to dis- to grips with American culture. Prime Obsession, written cuss some results on the Riemann hypothesis in the realm ? in a style wavering between that of introductory computer of quantum physics and operator theory. Only in the last Contact the Executive Editor, programming books and the Encyclopedia Britannica, two chapters, however, does he fi nally establish the con- [email protected] marks a clear thematic and stylistic departure from his nection between the prime number theorem, which states hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2 the Oxonian Review of books 15

Living and loving dangerously Sandor Marai’s Casanova in Bolzano

It was as if it were utterly unusual and somehow Italy. Five years earlier, Casanova had fought a duel there Sandor Marai freakish to fi nd a man that was ugly rather than with the Duke of Parma, the leading nobleman of the Casanova in Bolzano Translated by George Szirtes handsome, whose features were unrefi ned, whose region, over a young girl, Francesca. He lost the duel, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. body was unheroic, about whom they knew noth- was wounded badly and nearly died; Francesca married 294 pages ing except that he was a rogue, a frequenter of inns her aged suitor and became the Duchess. Th e Duke of ISBN: 0375413375 and gambling dens… a man about whom it was Parma, meanwhile, threatened him with death if he ever said, as of many a womanizer, that he was bold, returned to Bolzano. When the Duke does eventually impudent, and relaxed in the company of women: meet Casanova upon the latter’s return, he challenges as if all this, despite all appearances, was in some him not to a duel but to a more diffi cult proposition that way extraordinary. Th ey were women; they felt Casanova, as an artist and a man, cannot refuse. He gives something. Casanova a letter from the Duchess with the words ‘I - Casanova in Bolzano must see you’, and dares him to use all his crafts to cure Francesca of her girlhood infatuation for him. ith this vivid description, Hungarian novelist In a universe where Casanova has women easily and WSandor Marai introduces Giacomo Casanova to often—chambermaids, actresses, nuns, the nieces of the women of the marketplace and inns of a sleepy Ital- Cardinals—Francesca remains an elusive, haunting im- Casanova admits he is a writer before all oth- ian town. It is an ambitious entrance for the hero of an age in his memory, recalled wistfully in times of illness ambitious novel, which with sweeping strokes attempts and dire poverty. Was she truly ‘Th e One’, he questions; er things, for, as he puts it, ‘writing is greater to get at the heart of a man who is part-poet, part-ad- for she was one of the few women he could never have. than…fate or time’. venturer, and most certainly a great indulger in life. As Th is image of unrequited desire recalls Dante’s Beatrice Marai writes in a prefatory note at the front of the book, or Petrarch’s Laura, and the poet’s romantic yearning is his Casanova only has a few things in common with the indeed heightened through spiritual longing rather than in Bolzano is a much more ambitious and unruly novel historic Italian lover: the date of fl ight from ‘Leads’ (a cell through physical consummation. Certainly, Marai’s for this reason. beneath the lead roof of the ducal palace in Venice) and descriptions of Casanova’s love for Francesca invoke the But this breadth of scope is also the book’s weakness. later an arrival in Munich. In all other essentials, his work courtly landscapes of troubador and trouvere song, and I felt compelled to make editorial comments of ‘cut, is one of ‘fable and invention’. Nevertheless, in Casanova are among the most aff ective in the novel: cut!’ in the margins as Marai’s overly-indulgent writing in Bolzano the institutions of the eighteenth century loom became too wrapped in the trivial egoisms and self-right- as large as the human characters, with the decadence of Th is love matured slowly, for like the best fruit it eous philosophies of his characters, rendering the writing Venetian revelry and masque balls, the verse of Voltaire, needed time, a change of seasons, the blessing of stilted, tired and dry. Th e brevity of Embers, and its fi ne the Inquisition, Louis’ Versailles and the decline of the sunlight and the scent of rain, a series of dawns in choice of language and imagery, was a delight. Much of Italian gentry each playing a fl itting moment on centre which they would walk through the dewy garden that lyrical poignancy can also be found in Casanova in stage. And yet much of the book’s strength lies in Marai’s among bushes of fl owering May, conversations Bolzano, but only after the laborious process of trudging skillful off setting of these large, opulent backdrops with a where a single word might suddenly light up the through the rambling prose. Still, Marai is a gifted writer, much simpler, quieter and very modern tale of the crisis: landscape locked in her tender, cloistered heart, and his work is well deserving of rediscovery. the failure of language to convey accurately the intangi- when it would be looking into the past and seeing bility of love. ruined castles, vanished festivals where traps with Angma D. Jhala is a DPhil student in Modern History at Christ gilded wheels rolled down the paths of neat, prop- Church. She hails from the United States and Dhrangadhra, India. Th e novel was fi rst published in Hungary in 1940, She is currently an editor of the Journal of the Oxford University His- but sixty years passed before it was translated into English erly tended gardens past people in brightly colored tory Society, and has published her short fi ction in The Isis, The Pestle for the fi rst time by George Szirtes in 2004. Sandor clothes with harsh, powerful and wicked profi les. and The Dudley Review. Marai was born in Kassa in the Austro-Hungarian Empire Th ere was in Francesca something of the past. in 1900 and acquired great acclaim during the 1930s as Whether this is simply Marai’s description, or whether it one of Hungary’s leading novelists. Unabashedly anti- has been fi ltered through Casanova’s lovelorn, fi ctionalis- communist, he lived through the war, but was persecuted ing lenses, the reader remains unsure. Regardless, like by the communists, who forced him to fl ee his native much of the book, it plays with notions of authorship A possible end to the post-WW2 alliance country in 1948 for Italy and later the United States, and literary tradition on a meta-textual level: it is both system, a divisive American presidency, eventually settling in San Diego where he committed grounded in literary history by Marai’s neat hinting at Ireland's peace process, eighteenth suicide in 1989. the incipient Romantic age, and rendered ahistorical and century diplomatic crises, the role of Casanova in Bolzano begins with Giacomo’s hurried timeless by the employment of such archetypal images. ghosts in medieval society, the EU’s escape from the infamous jails of Venice with a dissolute I fi rst discovered Marai through his novel Embers. expansion, trade integration, war in friar, Balbi, as an accomplice. His notoriety precedes Originally published in 1942 and fi rst translated into Afghanistan and Iraq, a winded Celtic him as he speeds across the Italian countryside, fl eeing English in 2001, Embers is a gauzy, lyrical, intoxicating tiger, and a gasping United Nations. the police of the Inquisition under the cover of night. work. Hailed by critics on both sides of the Atlantic, this He arrives at the village of Bolzano, where he enjoys a fi rst novel in English was described as a masterpiece and In these pages, former heads of state and eminent academics tackle these comfortable bed, food, a good haircut and the pleasures topics, old and new, alongside the pinnacle of Ireland’s emerging major literary rediscovery. In many ways, Casanova shares academic talent. of women after more than a year of deprivation. To the many similarities with Marai’s earlier work. Set during townspeople, he quickly becomes an object of mythic the wane of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Embers had THE HISTORY REVIEW magnetism: women are enticed by him, gamblers come told the story of two close friends, an aristocratic General Produced in association with THE SCHOOL OF HISTORY, UCD to spend the evenings at his table, moneylenders give to and a bohemian artist, and their confl icted understanding him willingly, and he acquires a reputation for healing the of honour, duty and love in relation to the woman they Featuring articles from, and interviews with, Mr Bertie hearts of the love-struck. His bravado and devil-may-care Ahern, the Rt. Hon. John Major, Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski, Dr both desired: the General’s wife. Structurally, Casanova Peter Sutherland, Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, Mr F. W. nonchalance, however, conceal a far more complicated De Klerk, Professor Conor Gearty, Professor Louis Pojman, in Bolzano is very similar to Embers in its three primary Professor Eunan O’Halpin, Professor Simon Schama, Professor and ambitious psychology. As Casanova admits to Balbi characters and plot organization; yet Embers tells the Stephen A Smith, Mr Tom Wright. midway through the novel, he is a writer before all other narrative almost exclusively from the point of view of the things, for, as he puts it, ‘writing is greater than…fate aff ronted General, while Casanova in Bolzano is a much or time’. Fortunately given his predilections, writing An insightful publication ... offering unique historical perspectives broader and bigger story. While the artist (in the guise of - Mr Bertie Ahern, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland. and living fully are inextricably linked, and his voracious the writer Casanova) has the predominant role within the appetite to write can only be sated through experience: ‘I novel, Marai also gives considerable narrative space (and Contact The History Review for ordering and advertising information. Special rate for student readers. want to live. I cannot write until I know the world’. several pages of dialogue) to both the antagonistic aristo- It is this passion for living, for pushing the bounda- mail > The History Review, School of History, University College Dublin, Ireland cratic husband and the young woman in love, presumably Visit > www.ucd.ie/hreview/ Phone > ++353-1-7168376 ries of what is safe or probable, that brings Casanova to advance further meditations on authorship. Casanova to Bolzano; and Bolzano is not just any small town in 16 the Oxonian Review of books hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2

After Horace: I.23 To Chloe Vitas inuleo me similis, Chloe… Th e H Word Just like a fawn Seeking her shy mother Tom Wolfe & bad education Over pathless mountain passes Full of empty fears of trees and breezes, f Tom Wolfe’s latest novel, I am Charlotte Simmons Tom Wolfe (2004), is not as good as his fi rst two, it is not due I am Charlotte Simmons You shy from me, Chloe. I Jonathan Cape, 2004. If the arrival of spring to sloppy writing or a wit too prone to caricature, but 676 pages because he fails to engage with his eponymous protago- Shakes the shivering leaves ISBN 0-224-07486-5 nist—the novel’s title is a promise Wolfe fails to keep. Or a green lizard His failure is not on his reviewers’ terms, but on his own. Scatters a bramble bush, Th e fi ctional universes he has created in each novel cor- Her heart and knees tremble! respond so closely that one can conclude that for Wolfe, But, Chloe, I am not every human interaction is a status consideration and A rough tiger secondly, that every human interaction is a potentially mortifying one. Th e problem is that Wolfe is interested Or a Gaetulian lion seeking you in male humiliation far more than he is in the forms that To crush you: Come on, female humiliation takes. Stop lolling after your mother Th is claim is unusual, because all the reviews of I am You’re ripe enough for a man! Charlotte Simmons so far have taken up where reviews of Th e Bonfi re of the Vanities (1987) and A Man in Full (1998) left off —that is, debating whether the book is idiomatic expressions, and here he gets to really let the sophisticated entertainment or literature, whether Wolfe’s beast off the leash. He has repeatedly argued that his § argument that realism is indispensable to the modern reliance on ‘fi eldwork’ research sets him alongside nine- novel is true, and whether journalistic research ought to teenth-century realist novelists like Dickens, Zola, Balzac count for anything. Let me put this another way: in all or Dostoyevsky. of Wolfe’s novels, men are obsessed with their muscles. Most reviewers don’t let Wolfe get away with this. After Horace: II.10 Th ey silently name their muscle groups with benedictory Aside from the charge of sloppy writing, the one thing monotony (tricep, deltoids, latissima dorsae, pectoralis ma- that critics love to hate in a Tom Wolfe novel is his Th e Golden Mean jor); they fl ex and fan out the latissimi dorsi in their backs tendency towards unkind caricature. Wolfe’s characters when they want to make an impression. Muscles count. are cartoons of real human beings, critics argue, and as Rectius vives, Licini, neque altum… Th ey count so much (literally—the text is peppered with such, are very unlikely to provoke the reader’s sympathy. pecs, abs, delts, traps, lats, tri’s, bi’s and obliques) that Reviewers can’t seem to help themselves—faced with a Licinius, my friend, the reader is forced to make a decision. Is this obsession new Wolfe novel, there is something compulsive about You will steer your life an indication of our age, or a refl ection of Wolfe? Is our posing the question of whether cheap characters make for On a straighter course age one that is dominated by women with pineapple-col- cheap writing. As such, the critical debate each time he If you neither urge your ship towards the high seas oured hair, one in which men often moan to themselves publishes a novel revolves around the question of whether Nor, while cautiously avoiding the gusty winds, the words ‘loamy loins’? (Look to yourselves.) Th e prob- he has a social conscience and, if not, whether he should lem with the reception of Wolfe’s novels is that reviewers get one. We expect him to fl esh out the characters with a Too closely hug the dangerous shore. have tended to get stuck on metatextual questions like little kindness, nuance his writing by recoursing to moral- Th e one who follows these. If we keep the question of theme in mind when ity. Th e Golden Mean reading Wolfe, what becomes immediately obvious is that But now that we have three novels, perhaps it is time Keeps safe: his fi ctional universe is an overwhelmingly humiliating to turn our attention to the thematic conditions that He is free from the shabby fi lth-house, one, so fi lled with mortifi cation that one could even hy- make such (supposed) unalloyed cheapness possible? And being sensible, pothesise a physics for it. And if we look at these laws of Th e similarities in narrative structure between the three humiliation in detail, it becomes clear why Wolfe’s latest novels are striking. Each attempts to capture a milieu He is free from the envy of a palace. novel, I am Charlotte Simmons, is weaker than his other by assessing its impact on a particular individual. Th is two, Th e Bonfi re of the Vanities and A Man in Full. impact is always in terms of a fall from grace—fi nancial, More often it is the mighty pine Although I am Charlotte Simmons is about educa- social or moral. Bonfi re of the Vanities is about New Th at is shaken by the wind; tion, Wolfe’s attention isn’t on teachers or unions, but York, bond bankers and the fall of Sherman McCoy; Th e collapse is graver fi rmly focused on the bottom feeders of the modern A Man in Full is about Atlanta, property development When tall towers fall, university system—undergraduates. Th e novel, heavy and the fall of Charlie Croker. Not surprisingly, I am with fi eld research, is predictably drawn to education Charlotte Simmons runs along the same lines—though And it is the peaks of mountains of the extracurricular kind. Why can’t white basketball this time, the fall is less impressively fi nancial and more Th at lightning strikes twice. players completely shave their heads? Who keeps on moral. All three novels depict how an individual comes giving sports jocks SUV’s? And why are Diesel jeans so to terms with institutions whose purpose seems only to In unhappy times, necessary? Following the trials of Charlotte Simmons dehumanise them (predominantly jails and universities). Th e well-prepared mind hopes through her fi rst term at Dupont University (a fi ctional But most importantly, all three focus on one particular For the opposite ivy-league college in North Carolina), the reader quickly human activity to the exclusion of everything else—that realises that this isn’t life as an academic knows it but is, the act of humiliating others. Wolfe’s fi ctional universe And in prosperity, fears it. rather as an undergraduate struggles with it—and as Tom is an overwhelmingly humiliating one. Th ere are creative Wolfe researched it. Th e acknowledgements page of the and casual humiliations that stimulate (and possibly tire) If life is bad now novel thanks those (from multiple American universities) the reader in their anthropologically voyeuristic tone. It will not always be so: who took him clubbing; consequently, in I am Charlotte Wolfe’s nuance lies not in morality but in varying shades At the worst of times, Simmons we get undergraduate nightlife as an octogenar- of humiliation. Th ere is the humiliation of not knowing Be spirited and brave ian New Yorker sees it—a perspective clearly considered that every Hyatt hotel has an atrium; of being sexiled; of to be equivalent to Charlotte Simmons’s intellectually being given a 26 cent tip for delivering fi fty dollars worth And wiser still to shorten your sail idealistic take on Dupont University. Charlotte is from a of pizzas and feeling too physically intimidated to ask for When it swells remote county and her family is poor and devout. Playing more; of running the gauntlet of Saturday night dormi- Before a breeze too favourable. to two readerships, the narration blends her shock and tory troglodytes; of being kicked off the starting team for his amusement—Wolfe’s generation gets an eyeful (this is the year’s fi rst basketball game. Anabella Pomi what your children really do at college) and students feel Power in Wolfe’s universe comes from prestige or the proud fl ush of being generational grist to a writer’s status. Power is diminished by humiliation. All three mill. As a journalist and a novelist, Wolfe has always novels document the machinations of a particular society demonstrated an almost anthropological fascination for by observing closely how the social order can crush an in- hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2 the Oxonian Review of books 17

dividual. Humiliation, then, is anthropological. Nearly all Wolfe even waxes poetic on the matter of humiliation. about it. Furthermore, Charlotte’s forms of retaliation are of the supporting characters will stand to gain prestige by A third of the way into the novel, Wolfe shifts gear (the very diff erent from Sherman and Charlie’s. For the two the protagonist’s decline. Plot lines from ‘high’ and ‘low’ previous chapter ended with two characters discoursing men, it is a question of revenge, of male pride. In all three society will converge on each other in order to emphasise in ‘Fuck Patois’) and begins Chapter 12 (entitled ‘Th e H novels, male vengeance is considered analogous to baiting the rise and fall of this prestige. Th ere are always multi- Word’) with this oration: a dog so fi ercely that the dog will overcome its training ple love-interests, and the protagonists are not so much and bite back. Where is the poet who has sung of that most lac- concerned about this fact as with the possibility of this But Charlotte never bites back (there’s not even erating of all human emotions, the cut that never multiplicity being made public. In fact, publicity is the a metaphorical dog in her vicinity)—as one reviewer heals—male humiliation? Oh, the bards, the bal- key indicator of humiliation in a Wolfe novel—you aren’t complained, she doesn’t have enough vinegar to her. She ladeers have stirred us with epics of the humili- humiliated unless everyone knows it. What better way cringes and cringes. Her only alternative is to remind ated male’s obsession with revenge… but that is to demonstrate the frisson between public and private herself that it is just a matter of time before her brilliance letting the poor devil off easy. After all, the very spheres than the airing of dirty laundry? is acknowledged by the Dupont world at large. Th e status urge, Vengeance is mine, gives him back a portion Humiliation and prestige are subject to an endless she does gain by the end of I am Charlotte Simmons is of his manhood, retaliation being manly stuff . But process of redistribution. Wolfe’s universe only seems through being an acquisition. More than a few reviewers the feeling itself, male humiliation, is unspeakable. entropic because his narrative is geared towards dem- have noted Wolfe’s lack of interest in women. It is not No man can bring himself to describe it... A word, onstrating one half of the process. Charlotte, Sherman, that this lack of interest that is, in itself, objectionable. an image, a smell, a face will bring it fl ashing back, and Charlie all fail at doing that on which they pride But it does pose a problem when one’s protagonist is and he will experience the very feeling, every neural themselves, but for each of them Wolfe hints at ways in female. Charlotte can’t lovingly recite the terms tricep, del- sensation of that moment, and he will drown all which they can gain prestige by reassessing their priori- toids, latissima dorsae, pectoralis major to herself (though I over again in the shame of lying still for his own ties. Sherman McCoy loses his money, job and wife, faces wish she did). All she can do is use the running machine unsexing. a future in jail, but becomes proud of being a profes- and focus on how good her legs look: ‘…showing off her sional Defendant. Charlie Croker renounces his wealth Th is passage is key to understanding why I am Char- athletic legs was the main thing. She no longer thought of and tours the country, preaching the wonders of Epicte- lotte Simmons is generally a weaker novel than Wolfe’s it as vanity. It was a necessity’. Th ere is a type of girl that tus’ Th e Stoics. Charlotte becomes basketball star Jojo fi rst two: the Proustian recollection of the humiliating the boys at Dupont University call a ‘Monet’—that is, she Johanssen’s girlfriend, pointed out and feted at basketball moment is specifi cally gendered. Th e mortifi cations that looks great twenty-fi ve feet away, but not so great close- games, though dismissively greeted by her professors after Sherman and Charlie suff er are breathtaking in their up. Th e idea behind I am Charlotte Simmons was a great fl unking her midterm exams. Th e humiliations they suff er psychological ingenuity, but with Charlotte, they are one—it’s just a shame that Wolfe’s characterisation of his change them substantially—Wolfe’s caricaturist’s wit does predictable. Sherman sets off the court metal detector protagonist doesn’t survive similar scrutiny. at least allow for character development. It’s just in Sher- with his fi llings, Charlie’s jet is impounded in front of man and Charlotte’s cases, we aren’t particularly sympa- him—but Charlotte’s crowning humiliation is the famil- Jenni Quilter is a former ‘Bad-Ass Rhodie’ (see chapter 12) and a New thetic to what they’ve become. iar story of losing one’s virginity to someone who boasts Zealand DPhil student in English Literature at St John’s College.

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www.oup.co.uk/oxuniprint 18 the Oxonian Review of books hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2

Central & Eastern Europe Transition from within

Bettina van Hoven (Editor) nations subscribed to the goal of democracy and free Most people don’t go anywhere to meet with others Europe: Lives in Transition markets, but their trajectories diverged. As the decade or do something. Th ey hang in front of the TV Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2004. 208 pages drew to a close, Slovenia’s GDP per capita was three times mostly. But there is nothing to go to either. And ISBN: 0130910902 that of Romania, and while Lithuania consolidated its if you go into town, you are always harassed into democracy, in neighbouring Belarus opposition leaders buying something. and journalists ‘disappeared’ routinely. – unemployed East German in her 40s Such disparities and failures were often misunderstood by external commentators: for a long time, the English- Because now I see what opportunities there are, I language academic literature on transition was dominated eat at McDonalds, go around in jeans, and don’t… by outsiders with preconceived notions. Only recently did I don’t know… stand there in queues for vinegar. Western scholars begin to seek the insights of people who It’s another world, it’s America, ha, ha. actually experienced transition fi rsthand. Europe: Lives – Polish teenager in Transition contributes to this trend by presenting the Unfortunately, the spontaneity of such quotations is thoughts of Central and East Europeans about their eve- sometimes overshadowed by needless justifi cations for ryday lives after communism. Editor Bettina van Hoven, hen the Berlin Wall fell, euphoria swept both including them. It is commendable that the editor a lecturer in cultural geography at Groningen University East and West. Many dreamed that commu- admits her own cultural and ideological baggage as a W in the Netherlands, has compiled several studies drawing nist dictatorships would be transformed overnight into Western feminist seeking to ‘empower’ East German on interview and focus group research. capitalist democracies. Fly-in-fl y-out advisers such as rural women. Van Hoven moralizes at length about ‘giv- Th e book is original in organizing chapters not by au- Harvard economist Jeff rey Sachs advocated radical reform ing a voice’ to the neglected. She and the other contribu- thor but by theme: identities, relationships, production, to jumpstart the ‘transition’, a term coined by Western tors—all from the West—self-consciously raise questions consumption and power. Th e contributors to the volume economists and quickly embraced by Central and Eastern about how researchers position themselves as insiders or have translated and contextualized quotations by Eastern European politicians. Progress seemed guaranteed, and at outsiders. While valid, such post-modern introspection and Central European respondents, adding fl esh and a rapid pace: in 1989, Sachs promised that if Poland fol- takes up too much space, sometimes interfering in the blood to the theoretical skeleton. Th oughtfully sprinkled lowed his recipe of instant privatization and liberalization, eff ort to allow locals to speak for themselves. In the end, throughout the text, the quotes succinctly expose the infl ation would vanish and the standard of living would it is the original words cited in Europe: Lives in Transition transition’s contradictory nature: begin to rise within six months. that make the book worth leafi ng through—especially for In reality, of course, transition was nasty, brutish, Well, of course things have improved, because be- readers curious about the paradoxes of post-communism. and long—both for countries that experimented with fore I had a Russian television and now I have a Sachs’ ‘shock therapy’, and for others that delayed reform. better one. Kalin Ivanov is a Bulgarian DPhil student in International Relations at St Cross College. Th roughout the 1990s, all Central and Eastern European – Polish electrician in his 50s

Francine quand elle etait un enfant, 2004. Oil on panel Two at the wedding of Marie (detail), 2005. Oil on panel Some of the things we may never know, 2004. Oil on panel

Th ree Portraits Steven Stowell, Balliol College hilary 2005 . volume 4 . issue 2 the Oxonian Review of books 19

Oxford Authors in Print Featured writers

Christopher Butler hen What Good are the Arts is published in June, John Carey will be the second wizened John Carey Pleasure and the Arts custodian of the Oxford English Faculty to intervene in debates about the personal and What Good are the Oxford: OUP, 2004. W Arts 236 pages social value of art in as many years. Christopher Butler’s wide-ranging study attempts to re-establish Faber and Faber ISBN: 0199272484. enjoyment as a criterion for aesthetic interpretation and evaluation, whilst Carey’s work will off er a Limited, 2005. subjective defence of the superiority of literature over the other arts. Opinions will be divided; some 204 pages readers will welcome these books for shrugging off the hyper-politicised shackles of literary theory, ISBN: 0571226027 whilst others will berate them for similar reasons.

Richard Dawkins ellow of New College and holder of the his collection of stories is Matthew Matthew Kneale The Ancestor’s Tale: Charles Simonyi Chair of Public Under- Kneale’s fi rst book since his novel Eng- Small Crimes in an A Pilgrimage to the F T Age of Abundance Dawn of Life standing of Science, Dawkins established his lish Passengers scooped the Whitbread Prize Picador, 2005. London: Weidenfeld international reputation as an evolutionary in 2001. Kneale lives in Oxford, though 288 pages Nicolson, 2004. biologist with Th e Selfi sh Gene (1976) and these stories are a testament to his itinerant ISBN: 0330435345 520 pages. Th e Blind Watchmaker (1986). In Th e Ances- imagination – their locations range from ISBN: 0297825038. tor’s Tale, Dawkins narrates human evolution China to Columbia and from Ethiopia to with the privilege of hindsight, shaping the the Middle East as the author examines the random mutations of natural selection into a ethics of crossing borders and transgress- reverse teleology where the human storyteller ing norms in an increasingly globalized is joined by his merry band of common community. Th e collection comes to a ancestors on the route back to the source of brave conclusion with ‘White’, in which a life. Each rendezvous becomes the occa- suicide bomber is the fi rst-person narrator sion for a lavishly-illustrated digression into who uncannily demands and challenges the that species; unfortunately, the Chaucerian reader’s empathy. conceit starts to vegetate long before our encounter with ‘Th e Caulifl ower’s Tale’.

Kate Fox ate Fox is co-director of the Social oet and critic Tom Paulin is a fellow Tom Paulin Watching the Issues Research Centre in Oxford, an at Hertford College, a lecturer in the The Road to Inver English: The Hidden K P Faber and Faber Rules of English independent organisation that conducts English faculty, and an infamously opinion- Limited, Behaviour research on human behaviour and social ated commentator. ‘You fi nd the poem’s 128 pages. London: Hodder relations; her previous publications include title/ But not the poem’ he writes in ‘Une ISBN: 057122119X. and Stoughton Th e Racing Tribe: Watching the Horsewatchers Rue Solitaire’, the epilogue to this volume Ltd, 2004 424 pages (1999). In Watching the English, the popular of assorted translations from Classical ISBN: 0340818859 anthropologist turns her gaze on ‘the most and European poets. What you fi nd most repressed and inhibited people on earth’; frequently is Paulin himself – characteristi- diagnosing the nation with social ‘dis-ease’, cally agitated short-lines, clauses that jerk she discusses English behaviour codes – from between dashes, and frenetic phonetics that weather-speak to refl ex apologies - as variant all contribute to the irreverent energy of strains of social embarrassment. these poems. Thomas Marks, Magdalen College

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