On translation.

I have read very few texts in both their original tongue and in an English translation. Apart from cribs of O level Latin set-texts half a century ago, the only ones which spring to mind are Gil Blas in Smollett’s translation, Il gattopardo, and a few pages of Il cane di terracotta, before I gave up the English version in disgust.
A few days ago there was a discussion on Radio 4 between translators of The Little Prince. They had approached their task from different perspectives: one seeking to make the text seem the product of a twenty-first century Englishman, another to preserve its original tone. Although both positions have their merits, my sympathies lie with the latter. It’s sometimes true that viewpoints which strike the foreign reader as bizarre may well be normal for the culture which has produced the text, thus creating a case for finding an everyday equivalent in that of the reader; but if literature is to fulfil its function of enlarging the mental horizons of the reader that case needs to be dismissed. So while Smollett’s Gil Blas is great fun to read, it keeps the reader firmly within the digressive tradition of the 18th century English novel rather than conveying any sense of Le Sage’s tight structure and finely-chiselled prose. When Chaucer uses the word Bishop rather than High Priest in Troilus and Criseyde or Shakespeare has clocks striking in Julius Caesar they’re writing from within a belief system that, viewing all societies as essentially the same, has no problem with altering their accidents to conform to current practice - no longer a tenable position. As for the translation of Il cane di terracotta it somehow coarsened Montalbano, making him seem a hard-boiled American cop rather than a sensitive Sicilian commissario. Not from what he said - the translation was accurate - but from how he said it: the register was slightly out of kilter. And register is crucial. When I was translating Troilus and Criseyde into Italian, an Italian friend advised against Troilus addressing Criseyde as Lei rather than tu. But I felt it important to preserve the formality of the original (you rather than thou) which was so integral a part of courtly love.
Which brings me to Wallander. My wife and I first met Mankell’s detective in the Swedish television series, then saw some of the BBC version starring Kenneth Branagh, and finally read a translation of the first novel featuring Kurt. The translation seemed fine and the plot was engaging if not as feverishly absorbing as those of Larsson. But the Swedish television series was better. And better too than the BBC version. Now it’s not unusual for a film to be better than the book it’s based on: The French Lieutenant’s Woman was spoilt by Fowles’s self-consciously clever and slightly preachy tone- irritating the reader in the same way that Melvyn Bragg irritates the listener - which Pinter’s film-script mercifully jettisoned. What I find difficult to pin down is why I preferred the Swedish to the English television version. Both series were made by the same company, Yellow Bird, and both were filmed on location in Sweden. Perhaps it’s because one felt that the Branagh version was merely a translation of the Swedish - although they shared no plots - rather than an imaginative reworking in the tradition of Sturges’ treatment of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai in The Magnificent Seven. Of course, if the Swedish version hadn’t been screened, I guess I’d have been perfectly happy with the English one. In the same way I’d have probably quite enjoyed The Terracotta Dog if I hadn’t previously read Il cane di terracotta.

The Truman Show

On Sunday I returned home from my daughter's wedding. It was my third visit to Dubai. The place is certainly different. Somebody I met there summed it up as being like The Truman Show. I think she was spot on. The place is unnaturally clean. Everybody speaks English, even Asians who were born in Dubai and whose ancestors have never lived in the UK or the States. As my son remarked, the buildings look as though they belong in Sim City. Each one is plonked down as an autonomous item in the way a child might place his lego constructions on a play-mat. It defies reality in the same way that an economy based on sub-prime mortgages does. On Sunday we flew into Fiumicino. There are certainly some parallels between Ancient Rome and Dubai. Both were the stupor mundi of their day. But Rome was sustainable because it was built in a fertile region not a desert, and its wealth came from running a huge empire, not from bubble economics. I hope for my daughter and son-in-law's sake the bubble lasts a few more years before it bursts and the skyscrapers collapse back into the lone and level sands.

New Tricks Swedish style

Yesterday I finished reading the final volume of the Millennium Trilogy: The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. In some ways it was a gothick version of the BBC police series New Tricks, as both involve old codgers returning to active operations. With one difference: the BBC series is basically a comedy, Larsson’s is a nightmare. The BBC has three pensioners - played by Dennis Waterman, James Bolam and Alun Armstrong - recruited to a newly established section devoted to investigating cold cases. Larsson has just two geriatrics - Gullberg and Clinton - but they make Bolam et al seem positively sprightly. Gullberg is 78 and suffering from terminal bowel and bladder cancer, Clinton spends alternate days on dialysis. Unlike their English counterparts, they have returned to a long-established, sinister and highly secret organisation within Sapö, the Swedish security police, known to the very few who are aware of its existence as The Section. And they have returned not to right past injustices but to prevent those formerly committed by The Section being uncovered - and to perpetrate fresh ones. Unlike the redoubtable Amanda Holman, their boss, Wadensjöö, is only nominally in control.
Larsson’s novels have several irritating features. The main character, Blomkvist, like his creator is an investigative journalist. A great deal of time is spent on telling the reader what a wonderful job his magazine is doing rather than simply letting him discover this for himself. Every other page tells us how Blomkvist is irresistibly attractive to women and is a wonderful shag. Unless Paul Newman was using ‘Larsson’ as a pen-name, the author’s wish-fulfilment is a fantasy too far. The prose is often leaden, not helped, one suspects, by an American translator whose grasp of English grammar is less than perfect.
Yet none of this really matters. After around fifty pages of the reader’s feeling rather distanced by the author’s thinly-disguised self-congratulation the magic kicks in as the plot goes up a gear and one is completely swallowed by the story. Not great literature to feed the soul, but very effective entertainment.
Unlike Kate Atkinson. Her plots grip, but she also leaves you feeling that you’ve gained fresh insights into human nature. Her characters have real inner lives and her portrayal of a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s in Started Early, Took my Dog was a frighteningly convincing forecast of a condition I’ve, statistically, a good chance of experiencing first-hand in the fairly near future. I’ve now read all four of her tales featuring Jackson Brodie and they just get better and better. I’m sorry that Larsson won’t be writing any more books; I’d be devastated if Atkinson’s came to an end.

L'ultimo legionario*

A couple of friends went back to the UK yesterday after a ten day visit. They’d come to keep me out of mischief while my wife was visiting our daughter in England. Despite the awful weather we managed to get out and about. For me, the highlight of our excursions was the visit to Fermo. I thought my friends would be interested in seeing the Mappa Mundi and the ancient library which houses it. They were, but they also managed to get us tickets to the Roman cisterns. This is a monument which I’ve always wanted to visit but had never previously managed to.
Built in the reign of Augustus, the huge cisterns supplied water to Porto San Giorgio as well as Fermo. With the collapse of the Empire they fell in to disuse. In the middle ages two of the chambers were rediscovered by Dominican friars and used as a wine cellar. But the really interesting thing comes next. In the nineteenth century the whole complex was rediscovered and re-used as a cistern until the 1980s. But human knowledge and technology have advanced since the days of the Romans. Those primitive people had built huge chambers around twenty feet high but stupidly only allowed the water to fill them to a depth of four feet, the height of the waterproof concrete lining. So modern man being much wiser filled the chambers almost to the top. Oh dear! Too late he discovered that there was a reason for the vast amount of ‘wasted’ space. It had been full of fresh air in the precise proportion, relative to the water, required to keep the latter fresh. Lacking this fresh air, the water stored there in modern times became foul and unfit to drink.
Most people are aware that, years after the end of the Second World War, Japanese soldiers were discovered on remote islands, unaware that the conflict had ended and still preserving their loyalty to the Emperor. Just as Italy has nothing to match the UK in the survival rate of aborted fœtuses, so the Far East cannot equal either the West’s longevity or its devotion to duty. I was able to photograph (see top of page), lurking in the bowels of the cisterns a centurion of Legio XII and inform the startled creature that Romulus Augustulus had been deposed in AD 476, that the Roman Empire was no more and he was therefore free to resign his commission and return home to the bosom of his family. He refused to believe me, adding that even if I were right, who would want to venture out and live in one of the petty squabbling statelets which I’d informed him currently occupy the territory of the Empire. I think he’s probably got a point.

*With apologies to Manfredi.

Protagonists in peril.

The exam board we used in the seventies, when I taught O level English, required its candidates to write, inter alia, a narrative essay. Every year someone would write himself into a corner: telling his story in the first-person and then deciding to kill off the protagonist. I would gently explain that it would be wise to recast the tale in the third-person. ‘O no,’ the authors would always cry triumphantly, ‘ I’ve got the perfect ending: John [or Alice or Ken] will suddenly wake up and discover it was all a dream.’ They were deaf to my declaration that it was the weakest of all possible endings: after all they’d seen it done in Dallas.
If it’s a given that the narrator will survive in a first-person narrative, it’s a basic convention that the main characters in a television series will do so too. A convention that Spooks brilliantly flouts, for much of the excitement of a thriller is lost if you know at the back of your mind that the main character(s) however imperilled will survive. The knowledge certainly detracts from the pleasure I get from reading Diabolik, a monthly Italian crime comic. Since the ‘sixties Diabolik and his partner, Eva Kant, have survived death row several times, and each of them has had to cope, several times, with reports of the other’s death. Like that of Mark Twain the reports are always premature. Unlike the news about Twain, the reader knows that the it must be false: a plug for the next issue is always contained in the comic you’re reading.
When a friend came over in May he was immersed in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy. Respecting his literary taste, I bought a copy of the first volume, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which both my wife and I enjoyed, and she subsequently bought the remaining two volumes. On Monday she went to the UK, and I read the second volume, The Girl Who Played with Fire, which she’d just finished reading. Very near the end I was brought up short for it seemed that, Lisbeth Salander, one of the two main characters had been killed off. Now as Larsson writes in the third person this in itself presented no problem, merely a shock. The problem lay in the fact that despite having a bullet in her brain and being buried, Salander lives. On the whole it’s better for detective stories to avoid reminding the reader of the story of Christ and the son of the widow of Nain. One can go further: when the story is part of a series featuring the same protagonist, it’s best to avoid trying to convince your reader that the character is about to die. We know that s/he isn’t; far better to save your energy for creating tension and suspense in other aspects of the novel.
Yesterday I began reading Kate Atkinson’s third novel featuring Jackson Brodie, When will there be Good News. Atkinson also inflicts life-threatening injuries on her protagonist, though in his case it's entirely plausible that he recovers from them. Nevertheless considerable space is devoted to his brain’s activity in a near-death state: the white tunnel and an encounter with his long dead sister. One wonders why. Perhaps the book will go on to furnish a reason. I certainly hope so.
In the two Montalbano books published this year Camilleri, as usual, avoids the mistake found in Diabolik, and the stories by Larsson and Atkinson I’ve just referred to. But they were disappointing in other ways. In the first of them, La caccia del tesoro, Montalbano no longer suffers from the respectively ludicrous and repulsive traits he’d had imposed on him in the ante-penultimate and penultimate titles in the series. However the story had the most fundamental flaw of all for a detective story: I was able to guess the identity of the murderer little more than a quarter of the way through the book. The second novel, Acqua in bocca, was written in collaboration with another Italian crime writer, Lucarelli and deals with Montalbano’s involvement in a case with Lucarelli’s protagonist, Grazia Negro. The book consists of correspondence between the two detectives and newspaper items regarding the case. It was disappointing. One feels that Camilleri is merely going through the motions. A pity because the first thirteen Montalbano books were classics of the genre. Camilleri’s well into his eighties: it would have been better if he’d sold his typewriter and remained content with having created a memorable character and masterly plots. His last four novels have only served to muddy his achievement.

Et habitavit in nobis

In my youth the English year was given shape by the great festivals of the Christian religion. The build up to Christmas began in late November on the First Sunday in Advent. The Christmas season having ended on the 6th January, the next significant event was pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, followed around four weeks later by hot-cross buns on Good Friday and Easter eggs two days after that.
Nowadays - in our post-modern age - all these events have been emptied of significance. Christmas begins in August and has lost all pretence of being anything other than a orgy of consumerism. Nativity plays have become an endangered species, and the festival itself is embodied by ‘Santa’, as Father Christmas is called these days, rather than the Christ child. Hot-cross buns can be bought throughout the year rather than only on Good Friday, and these days Easter-eggs have as much to do with Easter as that festival had to do with the Celtic goddess Eostre from whom it took its name.
I’m not writing this in any particular spirit of nostalgia, or from any belief that the England of my youth was a more religious place than it is now. It’s simply that when I was a child I lived in a country which was still culturally christian; England - Italy is a different matter -no longer is. And that culture gave a shape to the year which it no longer has. The only festival still tied to a particular day is Hallowe’en, re-imported from the States a few decades ago. It was unknown in my youth.
However, for those of us who worship at the shrine of Cupertino the year still has a shape. Whisperings amongst the Magi of the computer industry begin in February. They claim to have seen signs and portents that a wondrous new birth is imminent in California. Then in June John the Baptist Jobs reveals the name of the saviour and announces the date of its birth. Like the Christian Advent there will a few weeks to wait and prepare for it to come and dwell amongst us.
This year, though, there was a difference. The Americans, British, French and Germans received the saviour on June 24th; the rest of the world had to wait until July 30th. Now I can understand Britain being first in the queue: after all its government’s ‘special relationship’ with the States provided the pattern for the one between Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. But the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and the krauts? What did they do to deserve Apple’s special favour? And then things got even worse. Unlike the favoured four, the rest of the world was not allowed to pre-order. Instead one had to wait until the official release date, July 30th, to place an order. On the 30th I went to the shop where I’d bought my 3G two years ago, not really expecting them to have an iPhone 4. To my delight they did. Then delight turned to dismay as they revealed that they only had the 16 gigabyte version. So I placed my order for the 32 gigabyte model and went away dejected. It finally arrived yesterday. After four weeks of waiting I’ve almost lost interest. I hope the Three Wise Men didn’t feel the same way by the time they eventually made it to Bethlehem.

Leaking boundaries

The inability to distinguish between fantasy and fact used to be the preserve of sufferers from senile dementia, readers of the Daily Mail, and members of the right wing of the Republican Party (click here for a case in point). Not any more.
Last year Ambridge gained a new resident: Jim. Like Lynda Snell, he’s a pain in the butt most of the time, but like her is given the occasional redeeming feature - thereby distinguishing them from Jailbird Carter and the irrepressible !!Vickoi!! Tucker who have none whatsoever. As well as sharing my name and a vaguely similar pre-retirement career, Jim likes to drop the occasional Latin tag. Last week he used my favourite - sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt - in an egregiously inappropriate way.
A month or so ago the Archers' scriptwriters killed off the character Sid Perks. Not, as in the case of Phil Archer, because the actor playing him had died, but because Alan Devereux had decided to retire. I’m sure he’s a good bloke - the amount of time the scriptwriters have devoted to the aftermath of his character’s death suggests he was important to his colleagues. But here’s the rub: Sid Perks was boring. He had the barking laugh of those devoid of a sense of humour, his great passion in life was cricket, the most tedious pastime known to man. Yet week after week vast chunks of time have been taken up by people reminiscing about him and mourning his death. Far more than was spent on the aftermath of Phil Archer’s death - a character who’d been in the soap since its inception. And of all the over-the-top reactions that of his former wife, Kathy, takes the biscuit. People don’t usually take kindly to being dumped by their spouses; turning them into some recently deceased saint is unheard of. If the scriptwriters were doing their job of delivering a consistent character, Jim would have told her so. He’s not a man who suffers fools - other than himself - gladly.
There was a time when schools saw their job as educating pupils rather than using them as fodder to climb up the meaningless league tables introduced by Snobby Roberts, and then enthusiastically adopted by the Blair Witch project. Those of us lucky enough to have been schoolchildren then know that Virgil’s words were spoken by a broken hearted Aeneas looking at the sack of Troy as depicted on the gates of the temple being erected in Carthage. The utter destruction of his homeland and with it the loss of his wife and the death of all his friends. ‘Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt’ is a sentiment which, alas, could be put in the mouth of a Bosnian muslim, a Rwandan tutsi or one of those millions of poor souls who have just lost everything in the floods in Sind. But to apply it to Kathy’s situation is ludicrously inappropriate, and if Jim were a real person he’d know it. But the scriptwriters have let the boundary between real life and fiction leak. They were fond of Alan Devereux, a real person, and seek to demonstrate this to their erstwhile colleague by inflicting months of boredom on their listeners: we miss Alan, therefore you listeners are jolly well going to miss the character he played. Why don’t they just leave Alan to enjoy his retirement and let the homophobic cricketer Sid slide into well-deserved oblivion?

The not so secret life of things.

Like most small children I was cruel to many of the other non-human inhabitants of the planet. Not to cuddly mammals such as dogs and cats, but to insects, particularly woodlice. In the West Country we called them grampuses and I would while away idle moments in the garden picking off the scales of the still living creatures. Now that I’ve reached the age when I realise that my own life’s a gift that will soon be taken away I’m increasingly reluctant to kill any living creature, even rather unpleasant ones such as scorpions, slugs and Tories.
But objects were until recently a different matter. Being insensate one could treat them in the same way an eighteenth century planter would his slave, or one of Margaret Atwood’s Commanders would his Handmaid. They had no minds of their own, they were simply there to serve. Recently, however, they’ve begun to fight back. At first it was a simple matter: freshly-washed objects would suddenly slide off the draining-board back in to the sink, others would suddenly slither from your fingers and crash, suicidally, onto the floor. Now you may explain this by, in the case of my first example, the slight earth-tremors to which central Italy is subject, and, in the case of my second, to the general dodderiness of the over-sixties. But how about this, smartypants?
For some years we’ve owned one of these all-in-one coffee machine. You simply press a button to tell the machine what size of coffee you want. It then proceeds to grind the beans, pre-infuse them, and finally, having discharged the grounds into a removable container, deliver the drink to your cup complete with a thick crema. At each stage a message appears on a small screen telling you how far the process has gone. When the machine arrived, the messages were in Italian, but it was possible to change the language to English, which we did. Admittedly a slightly odd English. When the container holding the grounds needed emptying we got the message ‘Dreg drawer full’. I imagined Dreg Drawer as a slightly over-the-hill Australian porn star clutching a protruding belly, in his younger days the star of the ‘adult movie’ Skin-flick at Hanging Cock. Then suddenly this week the messages changed. Dreg Drawer had disappeared to be replaced by the much more respectable ‘Empty coffee grounds’. That was fine. Unfortunately ‘One small coffee’ now read ‘Single shot coffee’. Now I’ve nothing against American English in its proper place i.e. the mouth of an American. But to find my coffee machine addressing me in a transatlantic dialect over breakfast was a step too far. I consulted the manual and set about re-programming the machine’s language. Being familiar with the Americans’ proprietorial attitude to the language we invented, I expected to find, in addition to the Italian, English, Spanish , French and German alternatives something labelled UK English. No there was just English, an English which had started as the Australian variant, changed briefly to standard English and, having finally ended up in Central Perks with the cast of Friends, decided to stick with American English. I’ve re-programmed the machine’s language to Italian.
So how does one explain the machine’s evolving language? I guess a scientist might say that all matter is inherently unstable, that protons and neutrons don’t have to behave the way they do inside the atom, they merely do so the vast majority of the time. Alternatively, one can take the Wordsworthian view that there’s:

‘ … something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.’

I hope it’s wrong. Not only could I no longer be cruel to grampuses but I’d have to be respectful and considerate to the furniture, the cutlery and all the myriad dumb objects on which I rely for my daily well-being or risk being pilloried in the Guardian for anima-centric insensitivity - or even have bricks thrown through my window by the lunatic fringe of the Things’ Rights Society.

All at sea with Sebastian Cabot

It’s an article of faith for those of us fortunate enough to have been brought up in the Metropolis of the West, or its immediate hinterland, that Bristol is one of the world’s great cities. We dismiss with scorn the rival claims of York or Norwich to having been England’s second city during the middle ages. For we know that position was held by Bristol right through to the end of the eighteenth century. York may have been founded by the Romans but they were mere humans. Our begetters were the giants Ghyston and Goram. Norwich may have preserved its mediaeval architecture intact, but that’s only because, like York, it was too unimportant for the Luftwaffe to waste bombs on its destruction. Our neighbour, Bath, may boast about its Roman heritage and Georgian townscape but we know it was merely a rest and recreation facility for the legionaries stationed in Bristol’s suburb, Sea Mills. And anyway we have Clifton.
As for Birmingham and Liverpool with their respectively repulsive and comical accents who could take them seriously? The same, of course, goes for those other northern middens, Manchester and Leeds. When Edward III made Bristol a county they were mere villages. It’s a matter of regret that they emerged from decent obscurity and sprawled across a landscape which although vastly inferior to that of the West Country is not entirely devoid of charm.
Amongst Bristol’s innumerable claims to fame is its discovery of America. Bristolians know that the New World was named after the Bristol merchant, Richard Ameryke not the Florentine map maker Amerigo Vespucci. Ameryke was one of John Cabot’s financial backers. And we know that it was John Cabot not Christopher Columbus who was the first European since the Vikings to land in America. The Genoan may have got to the West Indies first but it was the boy from Bristol who beat him to the mainland.
John Cabot and his son Sebastian loom especially large in the minds of people who went to my old boarding school for we spent our teenage years working and sleeping in the shadow of their commemorative tower.
Shortly after moving to Italy I was amazed to discover that many Italians have never heard of Bristol. One winter I went to the baker’s muffled in my Bristol City scarf. To my horror Enzo asked me if I were wearing Man United colours. I quickly enlightened him: the scarf proclaimed my allegiance to a football team from la gran città that Giovanni Caboto had sailed from to discover America. And like all Italians Enzo’d heard of Cabot.
All of the foregoing led me to break the habit of a lifetime. I recently came across a fictionalised account of the life of Sebastian Cabot, Memorie di un cartografo veneziano - ‘Recollections of a Venetian Mapmaker’. I’ve never been keen on fiction based on real lives or on historical novels. One of the things I like about conventional novels is not knowing how they’re going to end. And whilst a great novel will bear re-reading many times, I would hate to be deprived of the initial journey into the unknown. In the case of fictionalised biography, however, one knows the end before the first page has been turned. My beef with historical novels is their inescapable inauthenticity. However well researched the historical details it is impossible for the author to write from within the mindset of the period in which he’s set his story. Using ‘italiano corrente ma con l'inserimento di impurità, costruzioni desuete delle frasi e altri accorgimenti che lo fanno sembrare di un'altra epoca’ [using contemporary Italian intermingled with some linguistic corruption, obsolete grammatical constructions and other linguistic features to make the text seem to originate from another age] doesn’t solve the problem. The difference between one of Fielding’s novels and an historical novel set in the eighteenth century, or between Ivanhoe and any of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is immediately apparent. A great writer - such as Jorge Luis Borges in his short story Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote - will exploit this creatively, but on the whole I find the historical novel best avoided.
Nevertheless, despite ‘Recollections of a Venetian Mapmaker’ being both historical and biographical fiction I bought it. What interested me was how the author would handle the Cabots’ stay in Bristol. All in all, the novel confirmed my prejudices about historical fiction. The author, Francesco Ongaro, has obviously done some homework. Old Bristol Bridge with its houses is described as are several of Bristol’s mediaeval streets: he locates the Cabots’ house in Temple Street and Wine Street is mentioned. But the attitudes and concerns of Sebastian Cabot, the first-person narrator, are those of today, not those of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The sense of alienation which underlies Sebastian’s self-perception reminds one of Camus. The narrator’s reflections on the religious upheavals of the day - ‘… l’inanità di siffatte beghe religiose. … ovunque un invocare Dio a testimonio dei propri principi , ma Lui, in tanto sentirsi tirato da ogni parte, temo che abbia finito per partirsene da tutto e da tutti e non si riconosca in nessuno di coloro che ritengono d’essere i suoi apostoli prediletti’ [the inanity of such bickering over religion … everywhere people invoking God to support their particular religious doctrines to the extent that I fear the Deity, feeling himself pulled in every direction will end up leaving them to it, refusing to identify himself with any of those who claim to be his beloved disciples]- whilst admirable, reflect the sentiments of a Guardian or Corriere della sera reader rather than the outlook of someone living at the time the novel is set. And there is a curious omission: when the Cabots move to Bristol they seem to have no difficulty communicating with the natives. In fact there is no mention of their speaking a different language. So perhaps Ongaro has stumbled upon a hitherto unknown fact: in the late fifteenth century Bristolians spoke Italian not English. Or perhaps I’ve got it wrong: maybe Venetians of the period spoke Brizzle not Italian.
In short, although the depiction of Sebastian’s character is interesting if unhistorical , if you’re looking for a book which brings Tudor Bristol alive I’d pass on this one in the unlikely event of its ever being published in English.

Stop immigration NOW!

Got back yesterday evening from a few days in the UK. We'd arrived there on Sunday evening. On Monday we took our grandson to the Play Today centre in Guyhirn. Because it was a school-day the place was empty apart from the staff and us which meant I got to be his playmate.
On Tuesday we took him to the Sea Life Centre in Hunstanton and in the evening I went to see friends.
So a pleasant couple of days. On Wednesday, however, came my damascene moment. We went to King’s Lynn to have an eye-test and to meet my elder son for lunch. Suddenly the scales fell from my Guardian-reading lefty eyes and I realised that Nick Griffin, the Mail and the Tories had been right all along: the country has been overrun by immigrants. Everywhere I looked there were enormous tattooed Michelin men, women and children. The land I had grown up in had been swamped by an alien invasion. And thanks to a recent court judgement the poor old BNP has been forced to allow many of these creatures to join its ranks. Thank God I was able to flee back to Italy on Thursday.

And death shall have no dominion

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Finally got to watch the end of Lost last night. I’m pretty sure that, like Topsy, the series ‘just growed’, the writers having no idea where it was going when they began series one. Given that, the finale was reasonably satisfying. A couple of series ago I toyed with the idea that the island was Purgatory and I don’t think I was too far off the mark. It certainly seemed to be about redemption and showing, as Larkin put it:

Our almost instinct, almost true
What will survive of us is love.

Telegraph review Guardian review BBC review

A couple of nights before we’d watched the finale of Flash Forward. Given that the series was a dramatisation of a novel I’d expected something coherent and satisfying. It wasn’t. Looking on the web produced the answer: ABC had pulled the plug on the programme because viewing figures had plummeted by two-thirds in the States. The last episode was the finale only in name. In reality it was simply the last one to be screened. Unless someone makes the show more viewer-friendly for American audiences by rewriting the script to exclude words of more than one syllable, I guess I’ll have to read the novel to find out what finally happened.

The podgy paddy pasted

I’m delighted that yesterday the appeal court threw out BA’s injunction against Unite’s strike, though sadly only by a two to one majority. Today it was announced that the airline had made its biggest loss since it was privatised. I feel sorry for the shareholders. The only figure that has gone up since the podgy paddy took over is the size of his bonus.

Back to the eighteenth century

“In the trial of persons accused for crimes against the state, the method is much more short and commendable: the judge first sends to sound the disposition of those in power, after which he can easily hang or save a criminal, strictly preserving all due forms of law,” reported Gulliver to his Houyhnhnm master as part of his description of the English legal system in the early 18th century.
Things don’t appear to have changed much. In the preamble to his interview with Unite's joint-General Secretary Derek Simpson, John Humphrys suggested that under Thatcher the politicians had taken the initiative in clipping the Trades Unions’ powers, now it was business undertaking that task. As though there were a distinction. If the Whigs were the political arm of business in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Tories have long since taken over that role. With the advent of Blairism the Labour Party ceased to be the political wing of the Trades Unions and the necessary counterbalance to the employers’ power was lost. For all practical purposes the state and business are the same, or more accurately the state is the local embodiment of international business.
In March 1933 a coalition government took power in Germany. On May 3rd the unions were dissolved and their leaders arrested. The German Labour Front was set up to replace it. Its leader declared: ‘… I know the exploitation of anonymous capitalism ,… we will build up the protection and the rights of the workers still further.’ Within three weeks a law was introduced to end collective bargaining and, in effect, to outlaw strikes. Our coalition government is more subtle in its approach - the BA strike has been grounded on a technicality - but the effect is the same. Derek Simpson eloquently spells out its absurdity in the link in the previous paragraph.

Misplaced Accents

Russell Crowe has been taking a lot of stick recently for the accent he employs in his latest film, Robin Hood. Though, interestingly, the commentators differ on whether it’s supposed to be a Yorkshire accent, an Irish accent or even in one scribe’s opinion a Salford accent like that of the Gallagher brothers. Not, one notes, one from Nottinghamshire which, according to the version of the legend I was brought up on, is the county from which he hailed. Most, however, dismiss his speech as a mish-mash of regional accents. And that I would have thought is the point. The vast majority of the film’s prospective audience won’t be living in the UK. As long as the actor has an ‘English’ as opposed to an American, Australian, or South African accent that’ll be good enough.
Owing to the Americanisation of British culture, like most English people I can distinguish between, say, an accent from the southern states and one from the Bronx. But I imagine there are as many different accents in Australia as there are in the US or the UK. Am I aware of them? No. Is any non-Australian? I very much doubt it. Having lived in Italy for seven years I notice the difference in the way people sound when we venture out of Marche to Lazio. But before I moved here I thought all Italians spoke like Gordon Richards playing Captain Bertorelli in ‘Allo, ‘Allo.
What do Australia, Italy and the UK have in common? They’re all minor players on the world stage. How do they differ? Australia was never a world power, both Italy and Britain in their day were the most powerful countries in the world. But only the British think they are still of much importance to anyone living outside their foggy little islands. Because its eastern seaboard was once ruled from London for a couple of hundred years, we imagine that we have a special relationship with the US which extends beyond fellating the President of the day. The Italians ruled Britain for twice that length of time; does that entitle them to special consideration by HMG? No merely abuse for being part of ‘the continentals’ conspiracy’ to threaten Britain’s mythical independence. So although the world would think there was something wrong if Tennessee Williams’ Big Daddy were played by an actor speaking with a Californian accent, it’s unaware that Eton educated Bond should sound like Boris Johnson rather than a Scottish milkman. America’s culture has a global reach, Britain’s doesn’t.
A final thought. If Russell Crowe were to use the authentic accent these critics claim he should, he’d be speaking a northern variant of Middle English and no-one apart from English Lit graduates would understand a word he said. Somehow I don’t think: ‘I is ful wight, god waat, as is a raa; By goddes herte he sal nat scape us bathe. Why nadstow pit the capul in the lathe? Il-​hayl, by god, Aleyn, thou is a fonne!’ would pull the punters in.

Labour: ?1; Britain & Europe: 0

Mervyn King predicted before the election that whichever party ended up winning would have to impose such savage cuts that it wouldn’t return to office for a generation. If he’s right, yesterday’s events could prove a double blessing for Labour: both of its competitors may end up shafted. It certainly won’t be one for Britain, or for the already faltering European project which offers the only, if increasingly faint, hope of a secure future for our grandchildren.
I read recently that an Italian baby survived for two days after being aborted. That’s nothing: a British fœtus has survived for almost 50 years and - God help us - has just been appointed foreign secretary. The poisonous abortion, pictured above with puppet-master Ashcroft, is more than the token pleb in the posh-boys’ government. Nor is the worst thing about him the permanent chuckle in his voice which makes you want to hit him. It’s his ghastly Little Englanderism. An ‘independent’ Britain doesn’t have the clout to stand up to globalised business; a federal Europe might. Who forced telecom companies to bring down mobile phone roaming charges? The EU. Who forced Ryan Air to compensate passengers stranded by the ash-cloud? The EU. Who are the principal beneficiaries: Sun and Daily Mail readers or international businessmen travelling on expenses? It’s a no-brainer really. Or would be if the fœtus and his friends didn’t bang the patriotic drum - aptly described by Dr Johnson as ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel' - to drown out the truth.

Fatboy bursts; ranter fined

Last Thursday, the exit polls having shown that Labour had lost, I prepared a post lamenting the fact and linking to a snapshot of what the future would hold under 'compassionate conservatism'. I was going to publish it as soon as the Cameroons and Cleggites had reached an agreement. Late yesterday afternoon, when I received a text from my wife while I was walking the dogs saying ‘Gordon has resigned’, that moment seemed to have arrived. However, by the time I got home everything had changed: Gordon’s resignation was not with immediate effect and it looks as though a Lib-Lab pact is a real rather than a merely theoretical possibility. Unfortunately I’d missed seeing fat-boy Boulton being wound up by Campbell on Sky News: it had reduced my wife to tears of hysterical laughter. However, thanks to the Guardian I was able to read a transcript this morning and, even better, thanks to You Tube I was able to see a recording of the interview.
We watch quite a lot of Sky News and it’s a fairly depressing experience. First there’s the underlying Murdoch agenda: there was a good example the Monday before last. I got home from walking the dogs to find my wife very excited by Gordon’s barnstorming speech at the Methodist Central Hall she’d just watched on Sky. Unfortunately, the next, and every subsequent, time it was reported all we saw was a shot of a heckler. The initial report was at 5pm BST when hardly anyone would have seen it. But this will have allowed Sky to reject any claim of anti-Labour bias: we showed the speech in full - it’s not our fault if no one was watching.
Secondly there are the dismal production values. Thirdly, there’s the collection of weirdos who present it. Martin Stanford, a cross between Mr Pastry and an ineffectual Classics master, is the least objectionable. Jeremy Thompson, perpetually narrowing his eyes as he pauses portentously between syllables is merely amusing. But then there are the zombie lookalikes: Jeff (sic) -pity his parents couldn’t spell - Randall, all synthetic anger, and the genuinely terrifying sports presenter whose name I can’t recall so sparing the reader the traumatic experience of a googled photo.

I don’t normally have much sympathy for people who use Twitter. They have taken narcissism to a whole new level beyond us sad folk who blog. At least we know that our bowel movements and how much marmite we put on our toast today is unlikely to be of interest to anyone. And we have the ability to expand an idea beyond a hundred and forty characters. The only time I’ve ever agreed with Cameron is when he described someone who tweets as a twat, though I suspect despite his expensive education he had no more idea than Browning of the word’s dictionary definition. However, this morning I was astonished to read of some poor bloke getting fined, and consequently losing his job, for sending a tweet saying he’d like to blow up the airport where he was stranded. The nanny state in a good mood is bad enough but when she’s lost her sense of humour she’s a monster. All Paul Chambers was doing was having a very brief rant. Heaven help me if the authorities ever find their way to this site.

Miscellany

Ryanair leads the way.

The Tories berated the government for its ‘slow’ handling of the problem of repatriating British tourists stranded by the Icelandic eruption. Though God knows what Brown could have done other than he did. However we can comfort ourselves that, once the Cameroons have taken over, the market place will handle things so much better than ‘big government’. As a foretaste we have RyanAir initially refusing to reimburse stranded passengers for their living expenses and only backing down because there is an EU law which requires them to honour their commitments. A pity Nick Clegg didn’t raise this during Thursday’s leaders’ debate in Bristol, rather than going along with the eurosceptics' twisted view of Europe and trotting out a story about how long it took the ‘bureaucrats’ to define chocolate. Given that most people loathe Ryanair even more than they do the EU, pointing out this example of EU legislation standing up for the rights of the ordinary person might have won some converts. But I think Ron Liddle has said all that needs to be about the LibDems’ boy wonder.
And it’s not only Ryanair showing the compassionate and caring side of the airline industry. Rather than putting stranded passengers on the first available flight BA is flogging off any spare capacity at hugely inflated prices. Their ‘explanation’ of this extraordinarily callous behaviour was laughable. Yet, to its eternal shame, Radio 4 reported it without comment.

Fictional selves.

In the days when I was paid to bore people about the English novel, I read an interesting article on the relation between real life and fiction. It suggested that novels were popular because we all try to create novels out of our lives: give them a shape, pattern and significance which they lack in reality.
At the time, Walter Mitty wannabes aside, fictionalising one’s life was largely for self-consumption. You told yourself that you were much, nicer, cleverer etc than other people appreciated. In other words you played the implied author - as distinct from either the actual author or the narrator - to the novel of your life. The advent of the net has greatly increased the scope for this activity. Some people create on-line avatars, others write blogs, and some restrict themselves to on-line reviews. The problem is that putting something on-line doesn’t feel real. You’re not speaking to someone face-to-face, there’s no one to argue back. It’s not even like publishing a book which involves meetings with publishers and editors. If you’re writing a blog you’re fairly safe: it’s the twenty-first century equivalent of vanity publishing. Apart from those forming part of an on-line edition of a newspaper or magazine they’re largely unread. On-line reviews, though, as Orlando Figes has discovered to his cost are a different matter. Interestingly he chose the pseudonym ‘Orlando-Birbeck ’ when writing his reviews. Hardly the most cunning way of preserving your anonymity if you’re a professor at Birbeck College. But I don’t think he realised that this was an issue. After all he was writing for the web: and that’s not like writing for the TLS. It’s merely an extension of a private conversation with yourself, part of creating your implied author. As a high-powered academic Figes probably doesn’t read Science Fiction. If he did he’d know that there are certain points where it’s possibly to cross unwittingly from one parallel universe to another. Unfortunately for Orlando he’d stumbled upon just such a point. Unlike Ariosto and Woolf’s eponymous protagonists his creation straddled both the real and the virtual worlds.

Gordon's Ashes

We were due to go to the UK last Saturday, returning today. Thanks to Iceland not only helping to bugger up our banking system but disrupting our travel arrangements, we didn’t. So our daughter was unable to go out with her friends on Saturday evening, have lunch with us and her aunt on Sunday, or a birthday dinner with us and her brother and his wife on Monday.
And, if we’re to believe the Tory shadow minister for transport, it was all Gordon Brown’s fault. A line which will no doubt be taken up by the Sun and the Daily Mail and purveyed to and swallowed by the half-wits who imagine that the Tories - even ‘eccentric’ ones like Samantha Cameron who went to day school - have the common people’s interests at heart.
While the volcanic eruption wasn’t Gordon’s fault, the length of the disruption may have been avoidable. If it were, though, we should look somewhere other than No. 10 for those responsible. To those same airline bosses - the repulsive Willy Walsh pre-eminent amongst them - who have successfully clamoured for the skies to be re-opened. Since 2008 the ICAO has been trying to get the airlines and the manufacturers to agree to what constitutes a safe level of volcanic ash. They wouldn’t because airlines were afraid of the potential damage to their reputation and finances in the event of one of their planes being lost due to dust after an all-clear had been announced, with a fear of legal actions arising from the deaths of all those who had been on board. As one source at the ICAO put it: "The bottom line is that there is a huge liability issue for the industry here, so they have been super cautious on providing information. If they say it is safe, and there is an accident, they will get slaughtered." However, faced with losses running into hundreds of millions as the effect of Eyjafjallajokull spread and lingered into a sixth day, it was the airlines who began to call for the regulators to determine and set such a safe threshold, to avert the severe financial consequences of planes idle across Europe and passengers claiming refunds for cancelled journeys.
In other words, the airlines are interested in passenger safety if a threat to it could affect their profits. If it threatens those profits, they’re not. And fair enough, one might say: they’re commercial enterprises not charities. What sticks in the craw, though, is their hypocrisy, pretending that they’re motivated by concern for their stranded passengers rather than their balance sheets. That the prolonging of the crisis was caused not by that self-same greed, but by the Labour government.
And it’s not just the airlines who peddle a phoney concern for their customers’ well-being. This morning - the 21st April, the day flights are resumed - I received an email from Hertz which, inter alia, read:

Hertz Special Measures to Help Customers Affected by Volcanic Ash Crisis.

As a member of Hertz #1 Club we want to give you an update on the specific
measures we have put in to place to support our customers who are trying to get
home following the closure of air space due to the volcanic ash situation. …

… 100% refund on prepaid rates if customers cancel online or by telephone at
any point prior to the pick-up date, if their travel has been affected by the
volcanic ash disruption (up to 27th April).

However, when I went on to their site last Friday, when the crisis was in full swing, to cancel the car I’d booked I found it would cost me £45 to do so! So when the ban was there and people would have been glad of the saving it wasn’t on offer, now that the emergency’s over and hardly anyone qualifies for the concession it’s available.
But they’ll be able to parade their compassion, and show how they were doing something. Unlike that incompetent in No. 10 who had to be pushed by good old Willy Walsh to get us airborne again.

The Ranter's Guide to Avoiding Jail

Like King Lear, Victor Meldrew and many other men of my age I’m much given to ranting. Until yesterday, when I read about the case of Martin Solomon, I’d considered it a fairly harmless occupation. Not so: this poor chap’s tirades at political programmes on the telly led to a four month jail sentence.
Unfortunately for Mr Solomon he lacked his namesake’s wisdom. For although, to adopt the words of the Penny Catechism of my childhood, television sets, like relics and graven images, ‘can neither see, nor hear, nor help us’, your neighbours can. And having heard Mr Solomon’s tirades, instead of helping him they reported him to the police.
A pity, for there are alternatives - tailored to various levels of education and intelligence - which would have not only spared the neighbours’ eardrums, and Mr Solomon an enforced absence from the comforts of his home, but also saved the taxpayer money.
If this unfortunate man has only received a rudimentary education, he should be advised to contribute ‘comments’ to on-line versions of newspapers. The ability to spell, avoid malapropisms, or employ the rules of grammar is not required. Nor is any knowledge of the subject on which you are holding forth. All that is required is the ability to rant. However, for all I know Mr Solomon may be able to string several sentences together with only the occasional orthographical or syntactical error. In that case, may I recommend he writes a blog. Nobody reads them, so there is no one to upset and accordingly no danger of serving a prison sentence.
There is a third possibility. Mr Solomon may be a genuinely gifted man, who has aroused his neighbours’ ire not merely by the volume of his voice but through his cutting insights which undermine their dearly held political prejudices. If such be the case, fame and fortune await him. I’ve just finished reading James Hamilton Patterson’s third novel about Gerald Samper, a character whose whole existence is an endless rant. And an excellent read it is. One which I imagine has made Hamilton Patterson a great deal of money. So when Mr Solomon emerges from custody I would suggest that his neighbours bring this post to his attention, if it were not for the fact that being a blog they will be completely unaware of its existence.

Pardons and Millstones Part 2

Last week, in my Pardons and Millstones post, I commented on our common humanity. I’d like to expand the point.
Although only American evangelists with stomachs for brains take Genesis literally, the doctrine of original sin has put its finger on a fundamental aspect of the human psyche: the conflict between reason and desire. At its most trivial it's reflected in my continuing to smoke though I know it may well give me an agonising death. As Swift said, people are not rational animals, but animals capable of reason. We are not houynhynms but yahoos and if we try to deny this fundamental truth we'll end up as crazy as Gulliver at the end of his travels. Unlike other eastern cults, Christianity stresses we've bodies as well as souls: Gulliver craps. So beautiful though Milton's description of paradise undeniably is:

So hand in hand they passd, the lovliest pair 

That ever since in loves imbraces met, 

ADAM the goodliest man of men since borne 

His Sons, the fairest of her Daughters EVE. 

Under a tuft of shade that on a green 

Stood whispering soft, by a fresh Fountain side 

They sat them down, and after no more toil 

Of thir sweet Gardning labour then suffic'd 

To recommend coole ZEPHYR, and made ease 

More easie, wholsom thirst and appetite 

More grateful, to thir Supper Fruits they fell, 

Nectarine Fruits which the compliant boughes 

Yeilded them, side-long as they sat recline 

On the soft downie Bank damaskt with flours: 

The savourie pulp they chew, and in the rinde 

Still as they thirsted scoop the brimming stream; 

Nor gentle purpose, nor endearing smiles 

Wanted, nor youthful dalliance as beseems 

Fair couple, linkt in happie nuptial League, 

Alone as they. About them frisking playd 

All Beasts of th' Earth, since wilde, and of all chase 

In Wood or Wilderness, Forrest or Den; 

Sporting the Lion rampd, and in his paw 

Dandl'd the Kid; Bears, Tygers, Ounces, Pards 

Gambold before them, th' unwieldy Elephant 

To make them mirth us'd all his might, & wreathd 

His Lithe Proboscis;

it's only after the Fall that you feel you’re in the company of human beings rather than some impossibly noble extraterrestial beings dreamed up by a Hollywood screenwriter:

Why comes not Death, 

Said hee, with one thrice acceptable stroke 

To end me? Shall Truth fail to keep her word, 

Justice Divine not hast'n to be just? 

But Death comes not at call, Justice Divine 

Mends not her slowest pace for prayers or cries. 

O Woods, O Fountains, Hillocks, Dales and Bowrs, 

VVith other echo farr I taught your Shades 

To answer, and resound farr other Song. 

VVhom thus afflicted when sad EVE beheld, 

Desolate where she sate, approaching nigh, 

Soft words to his fierce passion she assay'd: 

But her with stern regard he thus repell'd. 
 Out of my sight, thou Serpent,

And this is why once we've unfrocked and imprisoned the paedophile priests - which we unquestionably should - and the Pope's resigned - which, given that he seems to be the Goons’ Professor Moriarty inhabiting Kung Fu Panda’s body, would be a relief for us all - we shouldn’t then make the mistake of thinking the Church is still not fit for purpose. Unlike the smugly superior Hitchens and Dawkins, its founder knew that human beings are intrinsically weak and fallible, not weak and fallible as the result of priestly machinations. That an institution composed of the unswervingly righteous is about as likely as an altruistic banker or a self-effacing blogger. So, while, in the words of Swift’s self-composed epitaph, savage indignation should lacerate our hearts at the wickedness we Yahoos can descend to, we must avoid Orwell’s comforting delusion that our job is to watch out for the pigs trying to take over and ruin noble ideals. We are those pigs. The enemy is inside each one of us. The best you can do is to recognise the fact and, in Auden’s words, ‘love your crooked neighbour/With your crooked heart.’
Whilst I would agree with the existentialists that a man is the sum of his actions - after all the notion is merely an elaboration, some might say an obfuscation, of the catholic doctrine that faith without works is dead - I think institutions need to be viewed differently. An institution’s values have a life independent of its members’ behaviour. For example, I deplore the recent tendency to suggest there’s a moral equivalence between National Socialism and Communism. Yes, Hitler and Stalin were both megalomaniac bastards who were responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people. But, and it’s a crucial ‘but’, Stalin perverted a noble ideal - from each according to his ability, to each according to his need - whilst Hitler put into practice the core ideals of nazism: all non-northern europeans are racially inferior, Jews are evil and should be exterminated, and the same goes for gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally disabled. Stalin was in bad faith, Hitler was true to his beliefs. Beliefs repugnant to all but members of the BNP and their fellow-travellers amongst the euro-sceptics. Devoid of talent, charm, and in most cases basic literacy, these sad individuals valorise the only attributes they possess: occasional patches of white skin peeping between the tattoos, and a British passport. In contradistinction, the Church’s fundamental values are sound, although its members’ behaviour is often not.
Pullman, and those who’ve climbed aboard that particular coach, would disagree. They contrast the ‘real’ Jesus, who embodies a set of values corresponding pretty closely to those of the average Guardian reader, with the false Christ set up by the Roman church and worshipped by its deluded followers. Which is really just another way of saying, ‘I’ve decided which bits of the New Testament account of the guy fit in with my personal ideals: all the other bits were obviously made up by superstitious peasants and/or proto-Catholic power-freaks’. The problem is that while it’s perfectly reasonable to say: ‘I like certain aspects of the man’s teachings, but others - e.g. ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no man comes to the Father except by me - suggest a megalomaniac (or God) and repulse me, the Pullman position isn’t. True, it has a long history: Voltaire, and before him a line of protestant ‘reformers’ and mediæval heretics stretching back to New Testament times. But they all betray a monstrous arrogance: ‘I’ve discovered the truth which everyone else has been too stupid or corrupt to notice, and now I’m going to remake the Church in my image.’ And immediately another insightful person jumps up interjecting: ‘No, your ideas are completely wrong. But I’ve got the answer!’ Unfortunately Pullman doesn’t tell us who was behind tricking Peter and the rest of the disciples - no doubt with the kind of con-trick we’re familiar with from Jonathan Creek - into believing their dead leader had dropped in for tea. If we apply the cui bono test we’ve got a problem. The occupying Roman authorities? Hardly. The Jewish religious authorities? You must be kidding. The Catholic Church? A protestant would say the organisation wasn’t around at the time, a catholic would point out that the first pope got himself crucified: hardly a smart move for a con-man. So although the early christians may well have been deluded in thinking Jesus was the Christ it wasn’t as the result of a conspiracy, but merely from believing what their leader claimed about himself.
There are several intellectually respectable positions to hold on catholicism. One can say that it’s the organisation founded by Christ for humans, not Martians, and run by humans with all their failings. Alternatively one can say that it’s a tyrannical institution which feeds off human fears and weaknesses. Finally, there’s the via media: its an organisation which has done some good things, inspiring great architecture and music and helping the poor and the sick; has done even more bad things, burning heretics alive heads a long list; but in the end is pretty irrelevant in this day and age (cliché intended). What you can’t say, and retain your intellectual credibility, is that the Church is some alien body which twisted the teachings of some simple right-on guy for its own nefarious purposes.
But, I hear you cry: What about its fabulous wealth! Didn’t Christ tell his followers to sell all they had and give it to the poor? Yes, and he also rebuked his disciples when Mary Magdalene poured precious ointment over his head and they complained: ‘To what purpose is this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor.’ Jesus replied, ‘Why trouble ye the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me. For ye have the poor always with you.’ Again he was stressing that we’re bodies as well as souls. As humans we not only feel things with our minds but give them physical expression. It would be a pretty odd parent who didn’t kiss his children or give them presents on the grounds that the only thing which matters is the way you feel. So building beautiful churches and filling them with precious objects was an entirely natural expression of people’s devotion to their imaginary friend. In the middle ages it went side-by-side with the founding of innumerable charitable institutions. And, alas, side-by side-with the luxurious life-style of the higher clergy. For, if the poor are always with us so is ‘the robber rich man’ always ready to exploit any opportunity that presents itself. Bishoprics were either divvied out amongst themselves by aristocratic families or used by the king to reward his senior civil servants. Just as today the tax-payer or company shareholders have to support the outrageous greed of Sir Fred Goodwin and his like.
So denounce the wickedness done by individual catholics, remember that as a human being you have the potential to act as vilely yourself, and resist subscribing to Dan Brown’s or - for the more literate amongst you - Philip Pullman’s fantasies.

Pardons and Millstones

Early modern heretics finally got their hands on an Exocet with the scandal over indulgences. For, like John Webster, our 16th century forebears were ‘much obsessed with death’.

As anyone with a nodding acquaintance with Chaucer will know, sexual irregularity was rife amongst the mediæval clergy. For example, in 1397 seventy-two clerics from the 281 parishes which comprised the diocese of Hereford were accused of sexual incontinence by the parishioners. The difference between matters then and today is that the misconduct was on a vastly greater scale, that it involved consenting adults, was predominantly heterosexual, and was not considered a big-deal by anyone other than the Church authorities and the pious. Readers of Clochemerle will be aware that things weren’t vastly different in France in the 1930s; readers of The Power and the Glory, that being the priest’s mistress conferred a certain social prestige in rural Mexico.

But if the clergy’s sexual misbehaviour was tolerated, Luther eventually found a lethal weapon to attack the Church: indulgences. They were intended to reduce the time spent in Purgatory to expiate sins which had been confessed and absolved. They did not forgive the sin itself. But this distinction was blurred by the minor church officials responsible for distributing them, encouraging the uneducated to think that they replaced repentance, confession and absolution. And when people were alerted to the con by Luther they were very, very upset. For the average peasant the one consolation for his frequently miserable and harsh life was the hope of a happy afterlife. Where you went after death was the single most important issue in life. And to have coughed up money to buy an indulgence and thereby a place in heaven, only to find that - by the Church’s own teaching - it did no such thing was a step too far.

Today, if people believe in the afterlife at all it’s a vague hope that there’s a heaven. In the Middle Ages people knew there was an afterlife and unless you were very careful it was likely to be very warm and involve demons pushing red-hot pokers up your backside. But if we’ve largely lost a belief in a personal immortality, we know that we live on in our children, our grandchildren and untold generations of descendants. And just as some mediæval clergy betrayed their congregations’ hope of heaven by mis-promoting indulgences, so their successors’ vile behaviour towards defenceless children has defiled what we hold most dear.

If you’d asked Pope Leo X whether an indulgence forgave sin as opposed to remitting time in purgatory he’d have replied, ‘Of course not.’ But he was very happy to let the misconception that it did raise funds to build St Peter’s. If you asked Benedict XVI whether he concurred with Christ’s statement that ‘whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea’ he would reply, ‘Of course’. But he’s presided over a regime where the reputation of the Church was more important than making sure that these unspeakably vile clergy could never have the opportunity to repeat their crimes. The Church paid dearly for Leo X’s dereliction of duty, I fear the consequences of Benedict’s may be terminal.

And that, despite all, would be a pity. It’s not that the Church has suddenly become more wicked: arguably its members' behaviour has improved over the past two millennia. Of the twelve apostles, Peter - the rock upon which Christ built his church - denied him three times; I’m not aware of any subsequent Pope having done so verbally, although their behaviour may sometimes have done so in practice. Judas sold his saviour for thirty pieces of silver, and James and John spent most of the Last Supper arguing about who’d have the more important post in the Kingdom of Heaven. A hanger-on, Simon Magus, offered Peter money to acquire the power to transmit the Holy Spirit. Altogether a pretty unsavoury bunch, far removed from the protestant evangelicals’ mythical primitive church untouched by the wiles of Rome. What we all have in common is that we’re human beings: utopianism as any reader of Swift or Orwell knows is a dangerous delusion, and as Christ said, ‘They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’ Also worth recalling is his saying, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone …’, and, as John remarked in an epistle, ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us’.

A good death?

Ever since Norman Painter died on October 29th, I’ve been waiting for Phil Archer to snuff it. And yesterday he did. Jill came home from an outing with Peggy and Christine to find Phil sitting by an empty teacup with some rather beautiful classical music playing on the gramophone.

It was a moving moment, particularly for those of us who’ve dipped in and out of the Archers since its inception in the 1950s. ‘I’m glad they gave him a good death,’ said Pat. And by today’s standards it was.

Our mediæval ancestors would have thought it the worst of all possible deaths:

‘A subita et æterna morte, Libera nos Domine,' they prayed.

And King Hamlet would have concurred:

‘Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head’

If this is the only life we have, the scriptwriters gave Phil a good death; if it’s not, I’m not so sure.

The Lisbon Earthquake (Part 2)

In Monday’s post I suggested that our mediæval ancestors’ reaction to a natural disaster would be different from ours. Yes, they would be horrified and grief-stricken but they wouldn’t have seen it as calling into question the benevolence of God. Amongst the dead the baptised infant below the age of reason would, ipso facto, be in Paradise; the decent adult in Purgatory; and the evil-doer in Hell, so saving potential victims from his attentions.

But this does not mean the more thoughtful would not have wondered why such events occurred. There were two answers - one of which, though it has its attractions, no longer holds water; the other might. The first stems from the concept of the Great Chain of Being made familiar by Tillyard to English undergrads in the sixties. Rattle any bit of the chain which links the angels and saints, humankind arranged hierarchically, animals, plants and inanimate objects, and the consequences are felt along its length. We are all too aware today how human greed and stupidity impinge on the animal kingdom and the material make-up of the planet. Unfortunately we are also aware of Darwin, so can’t really buy in to the idea that imperfections in the natural order - earthquakes and volcanoes - are a consequence of the Fall. We know that the tectonic plates began moving millions of years before the human race came into existence.

The second concept is memorably expressed by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde:

… O, Fortune, executrice of wierdes,

O influences of thise hevenes hye!

Soth is, that, under god, ye ben our hierdes,

Though to us bestes been the causes wrye.

In other words, things only seem to happen arbitrarily because we don’t have the whole picture. In reality every event is a jigsaw piece and God’s got the box with the illustration! The idea is given flesh in Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale, and most poignantly of all in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

In Chaucer’s story, Dorigen, awaiting her husband’s return to Brittany from England, upbraids God for having created the dangerous rocks which could sink her husband’s ship.

'Eterne god, that thurgh thy purveyaunce

Ledest the world by certein governaunce,

In ydel, as men seyn, ye no-​thing make;

But, lord, thise grisly feendly rokkes blake,

That semen rather a foul confusioun

Of werk than any fair creacioun

Of swich a parfit wys god and a stable,

Why han ye wroght this werk unresonable?

For by this werk, south, north, ne west, ne eest,

Ther nis y-​fostred man, ne brid, ne beest;

Pestered by an amorous squire, Aurelius, Dorigen jokingly promises to sleep with him if he can get rid of the rocks. At vast expense, he hires a magician to create the optical illusion that the rocks have gone. Her husband, Arveragus, having returned, Dorigen reveals her rash promise. He tells her she must keep her word, otherwise she loses all integrity. When she arrives in tears to keep her promise Aurelius is moved by her distress to release her from her vow. He, in turn, begs the magician to let him pay him in instalments, or he will face financial ruin. Hearing what’s transpired, the magician waives his fee. God has answered Dorigen’s question: the rocks are the necessary cause of a chain of noble deeds.

Unlike Shakespeare’s other tragedies, Romeo and Juliet is not an aristotelean work: events are not the consequence of a tragic flaw. On the contrary, the protagonists’ innocence is stressed. Instead it embodies the mediæval concept of tragedy as an integral part of the human condition: once we step on the wheel of fortune it will for a time carry us aloft until inevitably its revolution plunges us into the depths. But although the lovers’ deaths are tragic they are necessary to bring redemption. Their:

… misadventur’d piteous overthrows

Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife

… And the continuance of their parents’ rage,

Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove.

Today, only the lunatic fringe of the American evangelical right sees natural disasters forming part of any over-arching divine plan. According to Pat Robertson the Haitian earthquake was a punishment for a pact with the devil. One would have thought France, which until 1947 extorted ‘reparations’ from its former colony for the losses incurred by the expelled slave owners, might have been a more suitable target.

So, whatever he said, John Sentamu was stuffed. If he’d replied, ‘Stuff happens. But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure is taken for misery, And their going from us to be utter destruction : but they are in peace,’ he’d be accused of insensitive escapism. If he dodged the issue, as he did, he’d be equally unconvincing. In an age of disbelief perhaps the only effective answer is to address the issue we can all agree on: the yahoo lurking beneath the surface in all human beings, though pretty close to it in the likes of Pat Robertson. To ask why the disaster in Port-au-Prince was so much worse than the one in L’Acquila nine months earlier. Perhaps the French being allowed to bleed dry a desperately impoverished country might supply part of the answer.