Dark Forces

The most interesting aspect of the Andy Gray affair is the revelation that he was suing News Corp for alleged phone-tapping by the News of the World. The man’s opinions are deplorable but they were only intended to be shared with a fellow neanderthal, not - as a consequence of being secretly recorded by someone within Sky News and leaked to the Daily Mail - made public property.
His fate is just another example of the message we’ve seen delivered for years: don’t mess with Murdoch or something unpleasant will happen to you; co-operate, like the Metropolitan Police, and there’ll be a drink in it for you. Avoid promoting policies which you think might upset the Dirty Digger, however close to your heart, and his media empire will swing in behind your party whether you’re Labour under Blair or Tory under Cameron.
The revelation, though, is the extent to which Murdoch has infiltrated his agents into rival news organisations. Because it’s no more in the Mail’s interests for Murdoch, posing as a champion of women’s rights, to divert attention away from the threat posed by his taking complete control of BSkyB than it was in the Telegraph’s to have Vince Cable neutered. To be replaced by a man whose take on Sky’s boss - ‘We … wouldn’t be saying that British TV is the envy of the world if it hadn’t been for him’ - is so patently absurd that I’m surprised the Tea Party haven’t offered him honorary membership. If Walter Shandy was right about their names determining people’s character one can only conclude that Naughtie and Marr succeeded in finding the name Hunt had ‘Before the World Was Made’.

The Truman Show revisited

OMG - as the tweeters, texters, Facebook ‘friends’ and other semi-literate creatures lurking in the world-wide web's undergrowth would say- an article by Simon Jenkins in today’s Guardian has rudely awoken me from the complacent dream-world I’ve been inhabiting for the past 67 years. The Truman Show isn’t located in Dubai as I thought last November; it’s here and I’m part of it.
Last year I naively described the plot of Larsonn’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest as a gothick version of New Tricks. How wrong. Jenkins revealed that the UK has its own version of The Section, one far more extensive and frightening than that described by Larsson. The Association of Chief Police Officers is no longer a benign trade union for Chief Constables: that sanctimonious blaggard Blair turned it into a private company which, in Jenkins’s words runs ‘a murky organisation called the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU)’.
So the inhabitants of the UK are all unknowing participants in The Truman Show. Occasionally they’re shown glimpses of the real world in Spooks, which the poor deluded creatures are deceived into thinking is a television drama. On the contrary, it’s the reality; they’re the ones on the telly.

Winged Chariot's Brakes Fail

Never mind single men with money looking for wives, a more important truth, likewise universally acknowledged, is the fact that the older we get the faster time flies. Most people first notice this in their twenties or early thirties. I’ve yet to meet anyone in his forties who hasn’t.
Although nobody who’s made the acquaintance of Swift’s Struldbrugs would want to live for ever, most of us elderly folk rather wish Shakespeare had put his brief candle in a holder bought from Ikea’s shop in Dubai (see photo above). We all seem to have different theories to explain time’s acceleration. My own is that as we grow older each measure of time - week, month, year etc - represents an increasingly smaller percentage of our lives. And our life is our yardstick. When you’re five you have to wait a fifth of your life for Christmas to come round again. These days, though, as a proportion of your life relative to that infant self, it pops up again in less than a month!
And this year, thanks to the Christian calendar, things seemed to be accelerating faster than Jeremy Clarkson having an orgasm in a Ferrari. Christmas Day was on a Saturday, but to all intents and purposes it was a Sunday: all the shops closed and compulsory mass for papists like me. To be followed immediately by the actual Sunday itself. It felt that a whole week had gone by so fast that I hadn’t noticed it. Yesterday we had New Year’s Day, again a Holiday of Obligation and all the shops shut. And today it’s bloody Sunday again. Stop, please brake before I break.

The Pantomime Season

Unlike the English, the Italians don’t put on pantomimes at Christmas. With Berlusconi providing an endless supply of corny gags, why would they? This year’s annual pantomime in Ambridge is proving unusually absorbing. The BBC itself has announced that Sunday’s episode will “change the Archers for ever” and everything seems to point to some catastrophic event at the Village Hall which will decimate the cast. Something along the lines of Tony Hancock’s The Bowmans.
This morning Radio 4’s Today programme introduced its own edgy pantomime which inspired me to offer the following item to the spoof web-site News Thump (formerly known as Newsarse).

“Instead of a man dressed as a woman, this morning's featured Pantomime Dame was a Dutchwoman born in Canada pretending to be British. ‘Dame’ Clara Furse wowed the audience with her insights into British culture and ‘foods’. Radio 4 listener Signor Grandicoglioni - ‘Hey you canna call me Don’ - here on a business trip from Sicily said, ‘Wadda fica. She no Breeteesh. Me, yes. Porca madonna, we Italians rulla your poxy little island for 400 years until those bloody English eemmigrants arrive and take alla da good jobs.’”

Don’t get me wrong, like Defoe I not only recognise that we’re a mongrel race but rejoice in the fact. When I read Hugo Rifkind’s article in today’s Spectator, ‘Nothing makes me feel as Scottish as an English New Year’s Eve’ I didn’t sneer and think ‘You’re not Scottish, you’re an Eastern European Jew’. Like his father, the former Scottish Secretary, Rifkind was born in this country which in my book makes him as British as any of the successive waves of immigrants - Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans - who’ve colonised or - Romans, Scandinavians, French, Dutch and Germans - ruled this island. Dame Clara, though, is a different kettle of fish. Being naturalised, she’s technically British, but only someone with the complacent arrogance and lack of self-irony which this former head of the Stock Exchange displayed today would pick Britishness as a theme when invited to guest-edit Today. Like the banker she is, she thinks everything’s for sale in the globalised world she extolled in the programme. ‘Hey, I fancied being British, so I bought it!’ She’s no more British, than living in Italy for another twenty years and getting naturalised would turned me into Signor Grandicoglioni.

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.