POLITICS

How to Debate George Bush; By Al Gore; The New York Times

Wednesday 29 September 2004

This year, as usual, the dominance of attack advertisements on television has made it hard to get a clear picture of where the candidates stand. But the same media revolution that brought us the 30-second commercial also brought us televised presidential debates - and ever since the first of them 44 years ago, they have played a crucial role in shaping voters' opinions of the candidates.

America has long been devoted to the clash between opposing advocates as the best way to evaluate information. In this era of media clutter, it is all the more important for voters to have this moment of simple clarity when the candidates appear before them stripped of advisers, sound bites and media spin.

My advice to John Kerry is simple: be prepared for the toughest debates of your career. While George Bush's campaign has made "lowering expectations" into a high art form, the record is clear - he's a skilled debater who uses the format to his advantage. There is no reason to expect any less this time around. And if anyone truly has "low expectations" for an incumbent president, that in itself is an issue.

But more important than his record as a debater is Mr. Bush's record as a president. And therein lies the true opportunity for John Kerry - because notwithstanding the president's political skills, his performance in office amounts to a catastrophic failure. And the debates represent a time to hold him to account. For the voters, these debates represent an opportunity to explore four relevant questions: Is America on the right course today, or are we off track? If we are headed in the wrong direction, what happened and who is responsible? How do we get back on the right path to a safer, more secure, more prosperous America? And, finally, who is best able to lead us to that path?

A clear majority of Americans believe that we are heading in the wrong direction. The reasons are obvious. The situation in Iraq is getting worse. Osama bin Laden is alive and plotting against us. About 2.7 million manufacturing jobs have been lost. Forty-five million Americans are living without health insurance. Medicare premiums are the highest they've ever been. Environmental protections have been eviscerated.

In the coming debates, Senator Kerry has an opportunity to show voters that today American troops and American taxpayers are shouldering a huge burden with no end in sight because Mr. Bush took us to war on false premises and with no plan to win the peace. Mr. Kerry has an opportunity to demonstrate the connection between job losses and Mr. Bush's colossal tax break for the wealthy. And he can remind voters that Mr. Bush has broken his pledge to expand access to health care.

Senator Kerry can also use these debates to speak directly to voters and lay out a hopeful vision for our future. If voters walk away from the debates with a better understanding of where our country is, how we got here and where each candidate will lead us if elected, then America will be the better for it. The debate tomorrow should not seek to discover which candidate would be more fun to have a beer with. As Jon Stewart of the "The Daily Show" nicely put in 2000, "I want my president to be the designated driver."

The debates aren't a time for rhetorical tricks. It's a time for an honest contest of ideas. Mr. Bush's unwillingness to admit any mistakes may score him style points. But it makes hiring him for four more years too dangerous a risk. Stubbornness is not strength; and Mr. Kerry must show voters that there is a distinction between the two.

If Mr. Bush is not willing to concede that things are going from bad to worse in Iraq, can he be trusted to make the decisions necessary to change the situation? If he insists on continuing to pretend it is "mission accomplished," can he accomplish the mission? And if the Bush administration has been so thoroughly wrong on absolutely everything it predicted about Iraq, with the horrible consequences that have followed, should it be trusted with another four years?

The biggest single difference between the debates this year and four years ago is that President Bush cannot simply make promises. He has a record. And I hope that voters will recall the last time Mr. Bush stood on stage for a presidential debate. If elected, he said, he would support allowing Americans to buy prescription drugs from Canada. He promised that his tax cuts would create millions of new jobs. He vowed to end partisan bickering in Washington. Above all, he pledged that if he put American troops into combat: "The force must be strong enough so that the mission can be accomplished. And the exit strategy needs to be well defined."

Comparing these grandiose promises to his failed record, it's enough to make anyone want to, well, sigh.



Swagger vs. Substance; By Paul Krugman; The New York Times

Tuesday 28 September 2004

Let's face it: whatever happens in Thursday's debate, cable news will proclaim President Bush the winner. This will reflect the political bias so evident during the party conventions. It will also reflect the undoubted fact that Mr. Bush does a pretty good Clint Eastwood imitation.

But what will the print media do? Let's hope they don't do what they did four years ago.

Interviews with focus groups just after the first 2000 debate showed Al Gore with a slight edge. Post-debate analysis should have widened that edge. After all, during the debate, Mr. Bush told one whopper after another - about his budget plans, about his prescription drug proposal and more. The fact-checking in the next day's papers should have been devastating.

But as Adam Clymer pointed out yesterday on the Op-Ed page of The Times, front-page coverage of the 2000 debates emphasized not what the candidates said but their "body language." After the debate, the lead stories said a lot about Mr. Gore's sighs, but nothing about Mr. Bush's lies. And even the fact-checking pieces "buried inside the newspaper" were, as Mr. Clymer delicately puts it, "constrained by an effort to balance one candidate's big mistakes" - that is, Mr. Bush's lies - "against the other's minor errors."

The result of this emphasis on the candidates' acting skills rather than their substance was that after a few days, Mr. Bush's defeat in the debate had been spun into a victory. This time, the first debate will be about foreign policy, an area where Mr. Bush ought to be extremely vulnerable. After all, his grandiose promises to rid the world of evildoers have all come to naught.

Exhibit A is, of course, Osama bin Laden, whom Mr. Bush promised to get "dead or alive," then dropped from his speeches after a botched operation at Tora Bora let him get away. And it's not just bin Laden: most analysts believe that Al Qaeda, which might have been crushed if Mr. Bush hadn't diverted resources and attention to the war in Iraq, is as dangerous as ever.

There's also North Korea, which Mr. Bush declared part of the "axis of evil," then ignored when its regime started building nuclear weapons. Recently, when a reporter asked Mr. Bush about reports that North Korea has half a dozen bombs, he simply shrugged. Most important, of course, is Iraq, an unnecessary war, which - after initial boasts of victory - has turned into an even worse disaster than the war's opponents expected.

The Kerry campaign is making hay over Mr. Bush's famous flight-suit stunt, but for me, Mr. Bush's worst moment came two months later, when he declared: "There are some who feel like the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring 'em on." When they really did come on, he blinked: U.S. forces - obviously under instructions to hold down casualties at least until November - have ceded much of Iraq to the insurgents.

During the debate, Mr. Bush will try to cover for this dismal record with swagger, and with attacks on his opponent. Will the press play Karl Rove's game by, as Mr. Clymer puts it, confusing political coverage with drama criticism, or will it do its job and check the candidates' facts?

There have been some encouraging signs lately. There was a disturbing interlude in which many news organizations seemed to accept false claims that Iraq had calmed down after the transfer of sovereignty. But now, as the violence escalates, they seem willing to ask hard questions about Mr. Bush's fantasy version of the situation in Iraq. For example, a recent Reuters analysis pointed out that independent sources contradict his assertions about everything "from police training and reconstruction to preparations for January elections." Mr. Bush is also getting less of a free ride than he used to when he smears his opponent. Last week, after Mr. Bush declared that Mr. Kerry "would prefer the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein to the situation in Iraq today," The Associated Press pointed out that this "twisted his rival's words" - and then quoted what John Kerry actually said.

Nonetheless, on Thursday night there will be a temptation to revert to drama criticism - to emphasize how the candidates looked and acted, and push analysis of what they said, and whether it was true, to the inside pages. With so much at stake, the public deserves better.

POLITICS

When President Bush traveled to Pittsburgh in 2002, a protester named Bill Neel who refused to move to the "designated free-speech zone"-a baseball field a third of a mile from Bush's speech-was arrested for disorderly conduct. At Neel's trial, a police detective testified that the Secret Service had told local police to keep "people that were there making a statement pretty much against the president and his views" in the free-speech zone. The judge threw out the charge, saying, "I believe this is America. Whatever happened to 'I don't agree with you, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it'?"

Similar incidents have occurred at Bush appearances around the country. At a Florida rally in 2001, three demonstrators were arrested for holding up signs outside of the designated zone; the next year, seven protesters were arrested outside of a rally at the University of South Florida. At a St. Louis event in 2003, a woman and her 5-year-old daughter who protested outside of the approved area were detained by police and taken away in separate vehicles. This year, a West Virginia couple wearing anti-Bush T-shirts was detained by the Secret Service at a July 4 rally, and on September 17, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq was arrested and charged with trespassing at a Laura Bush appearance.

When seven AIDS activists were ejected from a Bush event in Washington, D.C., on September 9, the Secret Service told journalists that if they approached the demonstrators, they would not be allowed to re-enter the event. One agent told a reporter who was prevented from returning to the speech that there was a "different set of rules" for journalists who did not talk to the activists.

Brett Bursey, who held up a "No War for Oil" sign amidst hundreds of Bush supporters at a 2002 appearance by the president in Columbia, South Carolina, was arrested by a police officer who told him that "it's the content of your sign that's the problem." He was charged with trespassing; when that charge was dropped because Bursey was on public property at the time of his arrest, the Justice Department charged Bursey with "entering a restricted area around the President of the United States." He faced six months in jail; in January, he was convicted and fined $500. The federal magistrate, Bristow Marchant, denied Bursey's request for a jury trial, and later ruled that the protester had not been unreasonably singled out among the Bush supporters by police-although other people were there, he said, they did not refuse to leave, as Bursey did.

In a May 2003 terrorist advisory, the Homeland Security Department told local law-enforcement agencies to pay special attention to anyone who "expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government." In April of that year, after the federally funded California Anti-Terrorism Task Force fired rubber bullets and tear gas at protesters at the Port of Oakland, a spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center said that "if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act."

Secret Service agent Brian Marr told NPR that the agency creates free-speech zones because "these individuals may be so involved with trying to shout their support or nonsupport that inadvertently they may walk out into the motorcade route and be injured ... we want to be sure that they are able to go home at the end of the evening and not be injured in any way." The ACLU is suing the Secret Service for suppressing protest at Bush events in Arizona, California, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, Texas, and elsewhere.

ON BUSH
Chuck D, PUBLIC ENEMY:
Today is the first day of school for my kids. I got one in eleventh grade and another in fifth grade. The older one looks upon this election almost like it's pop culture. One day she asked me about Fahrenheit 9/11, and she was talking about it like it was the latest Usher concert. You know, it's gonna be her world. And when a bunch of fifty- and sixty-year-olds fuck it up for them, that's not a cool thing. Sending these twenty- and thirty-year-olds overseas to fight and die, what the hell is that all about? The real axis of evil is Bush and Cheney. They have detached America from the rest of the planet by invading Iraq. Whenever people start saying God anointed them to do something, it's a turnoff, because I don't think anyone has God's beeper number.

Adam Horovitz, BEASTIE BOYS:
I don't understand the George Bush argument. If you wanna argue Republican or Democrat, that's one thing, but Bush - I haven't seen the argument as to why this guy should get four more years. I don't see why he should be running a baseball team, let alone be president. At one of the Democratic debates, Al Sharpton said, "I can guarantee that any one of us on the stage right now in his sleep would make a better president than George Bush." What's at stake in this election? War. People's freedoms around the world and here at home. Women's right to choose, prayer in school, my grandmother getting medicine - the list could keep on going. This election really does seem crucial. If Bush gets re-elected, he will feel like the possibilities are limitless, that he can really do whatever he wants.

Jeff Tweedy, WILCO:
When people ask why this election is so close, I can't explain it. It's like trying to figure out how Billy Ray Cyrus sold 10 million records. The Republicans have done an extremely good job of appropriating populist themes. They somehow make it seem as though they're a party of the people, even though their policies hurt some of their most ardent supporters.
Bush's hypocrisy is simply staggering. He argues that stem-cell research is not justified because of the sanctity of unborn life - yet he insists that dropping bombs on innocent people will lead to a better world. I'm also worried that if he is re-elected, he may have the chance to appoint more conservative judges to the Supreme Court. He could undo three generations of progress in this country toward civil equality and women's rights. I will vote for John Kerry, and I'll do it with a good conscience. I believe that he's our only shot at steering this ship back to some calmer waters. I agree that Kerry has flip-flopped on some ideas, but I take that as a sign of intelligence. I trust someone more if he re-examines his positions and has the ability to be introspective. There's no end to the horrific things you can do when you believe you're always right.

Mike D, BEASTIE BOYS:
I have no sense of Bush as a man. It's impossible to distinguish his personal interests from the interests of those closest to him. What is his own agenda, vs. the agenda of guys like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz? I don't think I've ever heard him speak on an issue where it seemed to be coming directly from himself.
John Kerry offers the promise of returning to the democratic system I was brought up believing in. He wants to provide the opportunity and education and health care we deserve. He wants to safeguard the welfare of all citizens, especially the poor - not just those who have the most. He wants to get us back to being a responsible and respected world citizen, as opposed to a careless, misdirected, hated bully. It's really one of history's great lost opportunities that we squandered all the good will we enjoyed from the rest of the world after September 11th.

Moby:
It's important to get swing voters to support Kerry. But it's also important to communicate with conservative Republicans and say, "Listen, by traditional conservative criteria, George Bush is a bad president. His foreign policy is in shambles, his economic policy is in shambles." You can be conservative and still not like George Bush. People like him because they think he seems like a strong guy who would be good to have a BBQ with. But shouldn't you hold the president to higher standards than who would you like to have a BBQ with?

Bob Weir, THE DEAD:
Ralph Nader is the most arrogant and narcissistic guy I've ever met. I had a meeting with him in the early Nineties. I was jazzed going into the meeting, and I was disgusted leaving. I don't think I've ever met a bigger asshole. If he hadn't run in the last election, we wouldn't be in Iraq and thousands of people wouldn't have died needlessly. And still he's well pleased to go in and be the spoiler again!
Harry Truman said that the one crime more heinous than treason is war profiteering, and yet we have the company that our vice president is still on retainer to - which is illegal - making a huge fortune. Every time the terrorists blow up another pipeline over there, Halliburton makes millions of dollars pasting it back together. They don't even have to be pumping oil to be making money. This is who owns our government now. Though I've never really endorsed a political candidate before, I'm going to have to this time. I liked the look in Kerry's eye when I met him. He looks like an aware human being and a guy with a sense of humor. So we're just going to have to hope and pray that the debates go well.

Eddie Vedder, PEARL JAM:
I supported ralph nader in 2000, but it's a time of crisis. We have to get a new administration in. All of us who supported Ralph last time should get down on our knees and say, "Can you bow out on October 3rd? We'll get back to the ideals you're fighting for on November 3rd." A year ago it seemed impossible to criticize Bush, because of September 11th. The Dixie Chicks and Michael Moore were attacked for speaking out. Now you've got books full of facts that show how Bush has failed. Those people dissenting a year ago were right. We have to stop treating the rest of the world like our subjects. What is the only institution more powerful than the United States government - one that can move things in a different direction? It's the American people. It's the voters. That's what I feel most strongly about: encouraging people who don't normally vote to understand their responsibility.

Mike Mills, R.E.M.:
The vote for change tour is a wake-up call. We may alienate some fans over this. I don't like that - I prefer to have music stand apart from political feelings. But this is so important, it's worth it. If I piss a few people off, good. Because, frankly, I'm scared. Unlike a lot of political issues, this is literally life or death. Kerry understands how the world works, in a way that Bush does not. When Bush ran the first time, I realized something: I want my president to be smarter than I am. I don't ask much, but I want him to be smarter than me.

POP SONG LYRICS

Vertigo - U2

Unos, dos, tres, catorce [1,2,3,14]
Turn it up loud, captain!
Lights go down
It's dark
The jungle is your head
Can't rule your heart
I'm feeling so much stronger
Than I thought
Your eyes are wide
And though your soul
it can't be bought
your mind can wander
Hello, Hello
Hola!
I'm at a place called vertigo (¿Dónde está?)
It's everything I wish I didn't know
Except you give me something I can feel
Feel
The night is full of holes
Those bullets rip the sky
Of ink with gold
They twinkle as the boys play rock and roll
They know that they can't dance
At least they knowI can't stand the beat
I'm askin' for the cheque
Girl with crimson nails
Has Jesus 'round the neck
Swinging to the music
All this, all of this can be yours
Just give me what I want
And no one gets hurt
You're teaching me
Your love is teaching me
How to kneel

Leaving New York - R.E.M.
It's quiet now, and what it brings is everything...
Comes calling back a brilliant night, I'm still awake
I looked ahead I'm sure I saw you there
You don't need me to tell you now, that nothing can compare
You might have laughed if I told you
You might have hidden the frown
You might have succeeded in changing me
I might have been turned around
It's easier to leave than to be left behind
Leaving was never my proud
Leaving New York never easy
I saw the life fading out
Now life is sweet and what it brings I tried to take...
The loneliness, it wears me out, it lies in wait
And on our lost till in my eyes, shadow of necklace across your thigh
I might have lived my life in a dream, but i swear, this is real
Memory fuses in shattered-out glass, but carry your future, forget the past
But it's you, it's what i feel.
You might have laughed if I told you (it's pulling me apart)
You might have hidden the frown (change)
You might have succeeded in changing me (it's pulling me apart)
I might have been turned around (change)
It's easier to leave than to be left behind (it's pulling me apart)
Leaving was never my proud (change)
Leaving New York never easy (it's pulling me apart)
I saw the light fading out
You find it in your heart, it's pulling me apart
You find it in your heart, change...
I told you, forever, I love you, forever (you find it in your heart, it's pulling me apart)
I told you ,I love you, I love you, forever (you find it in your heart, change)
I told you, forever, I love you, forever (you find it in your heart, it's pulling me apart)
I told you, I love you, I love you, forever (you find it in your heart, change)
You might have laughed if I told you (forever, forever,I told You, forever)
You might have hidden the frown (change)
You might have succeeded in changing me (it's pulling me apart)
I might have been turned around (change)
It's easier to leave than to be left behind (it's pulling me apart)
Leaving was never my proud (change)
Leaving New York never easy (it's pulling me apart)
I saw the life fading out (change)

The Outsiders - R.E.M.
You took me to the restaurant where we first met
You knocked a future shock crowbar upside my head
I got caught with the stop of the tick-tock, tick-tock clock
When you told me what you knew
Lost in the moment
The day that the music stopped
And I do remember you
Drawing patterns with a cork on the tablecloth
Promising volcanic change of plot
Where will this lead us - I'm scared of the storm
The outsiders are gathering, a new day is born
I tried to tell you I am not afraid
You looked up and saw it all across my face
So am I with you or am I against
I don't think it's that easy - we're lost in regret
Now I'm trying to remember
The feeling when the music stopped
When you told me what you knew
Lost in the moment
The day that the music stopped
And I do remember you
Drawing patterns with a cork on the tablecloth
Promising volcanic change of plot
Where does this leave us
A man walks away when every muscle says to stay. How many yesterdays - they each weigh heavy. Who says what changes may come? Who says what we call home? I know you see right through me, my luminescence fades. The dusk provides an antidote, I am not afraid. I've been a million times in my mind. This is really just a technicality, frailty, reality. Uh, it's time to breathe, time to believe. Let it go and run towards the sea. They don't teach that, they don't know what you mean. They don't understand, they don't know what you mean. They don't get it, I wanna scream. I wanna breathe again, I wanna dream. I wanna float a quote from Martin Luther King: I am not afraid.



Each coming Night - Iron & Wine

Will you say when I’m gone away
"My lover came to me and we'd lay
In rooms unfamiliar but until now"
Will you say to them when I’m gone
"I loved your son for his sturdy arms
We both learned to cradle then live without"
Will you say to me when I’m gone
"Your face has faded but lingers on
Because light strikes a deal with each coming night"

MUSIC

ART: VINCENT VAN GOGH'S "WHEAT FIELD WITH SUN AND CLOUD" (1889)



BOOKS: INTERVIEW WITH IAN McEWAN (April 2004)

"No one now writing fiction in the English language surpasses Ian McEwan," the Washington Post Book World proclaimed upon the publication of the author's twelfth novel, Atonement(which would soon thereafter earn the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction). Forgive the hyperbole. To read McEwan is to be swept away by prose of astonishing precision and power, and to be constantly surprised by the ambition and breadth of his scope. Since his first collection of stories, First Love, Last Rights, arrived to international acclaim in 1975, capturing the Somerset Maugham Award in the process, the literary world has cleared room for each new release: in 1987, The Child in Time won the Whitbread Best Novel Award; in 1998, Amsterdam took home the Booker Prize.

Q: Salman Rushdie has talked about his "language project," how his approach to writing has evolved over the years. Your own work has certainly changed through the decades. I wonder how that evolution appears to you now, and where you find yourself in the arc.

Ian McEwan: It's always hard for me to describe. I'm about four-fifths of the way through a novel, and like everything I've done, it feels to me like it's the first thing I ever did. It is radically different from my last novel or any novel before that. I guess this project of endlessly reinventing yourself does become central. I'm very slow at starting a book. I require a lot of time between them — Amsterdam after Enduring Love was an exception. I almost have to become a different person. Some ground has to shift very slowly under me. The emotional reach and the priorities have to shift. I thought I'd come to the end of something with Enduring Love. Amsterdam and Atonement and the book I'm writing now all seem to be so entirely different from each other that I find it hard to bind them within any single scheme. I can't really describe myself as having anything so specific as a language project. I feel that I'm involved in a long-term investigation of human nature.

There's a kind of meta-story that unfolds for any writer who's been doing this for more than a couple decades. That is: the story of your story, the story that's told by your eighteen inches of bookshelf, or whatever it is. One of the great pleasures of writing is not knowing where that story is taking you. You're a character in it — you're a character in the metafiction of What next?
The interesting thing I've discovered is that every book you publish changes all the books you've published before. People now look at the rest of my work through the prism of Atonement and find all sorts of connections. Before that it was Enduring Love or Amsterdam or Black Dogs that they saw things through. I find that immensely pleasurable. It's that unfolding story… If someone were to tell me what I would be writing in the book after next, I know that it would surprise me — I hope it would surprise me completely, that there would be nothing about it that I could guess from anything I've done before — but the moment it's published it will assimilate itself and retrospectively shift everything along.

I think that's going to happen with this book, which is set within a single day, a certain day last year. It is a departure for me in that its central character lives in my house, in my square. He's a brain surgeon, so I've been going and watching very closely major brain surgery. When I go back to England I've got a lot more of this, not out of any gory or prurient interest, but one aspect of this is the fascination with work and its pleasures, the slight abandonment of self that complete immersion in work can bring, the focus. It needn't be work, actually — it could be in a tennis game or cooking a meal — but there's a certain kind of hard-to-describe, selfless elation that comes occasionally with writing, for example, certainly not all the time, but in moments, half hours, two-hour stretches, when you don't even know you exist. You're only doing the thing you're doing and you're not even aware of the clock or what you're going to do next or where you are in the story of your existence.

I was looking for a kind of work that might have to draw on this kind of resource daily, and I decided that surgery would fit the bill. And it's turned out to be absolutely correct. The man I'm shadowing is never happier than when he's operating on someone's brain. He's transported. That's what he lives for, to get back in there.

Q: To focus on a brain surgeon seems appropriate, in that there's a movement in your more recent work toward a greater articulation of thought, from extensive descriptions of setting and scene in the earlier books toward a greater consciousness of characters' thought processes.
The Comfort of Strangers is a good example of the earlier style. As these two foreigners try to make sense of their surroundings, the reader confronts an obsessive description of things, as if the characters' eyes are fluttering around the room, trying to gather information, trying to settle on something — and yet the book is almost entirely internalized.

McEwan: It's all very subjective description, yes. Although I would have denied this strenuously at the time, I think I was in the last, dying moments of an interest in a kind of existential novel in which you never allowed yourself to say, "He thought…" I thought that was a piece of rusted machinery that belonged to the nineteenth century.

You built your world through impressions so that the state of the street or the weather was your route into the character's mind. And yes, I did move away from that. The Cement Garden was the same. At the same time, I became interested in describing the flow of thought, but also I became more interested in history and time and recognizable communal places, whereas in my first two novels I thought I would never stoop to naming a place, I would never stoop to naming a time — my novels were going to hang in a free, ethereal realm. I guess it was a last modernist notion, which I don't think I could sustain. Nor would it allow me to do all the other things I wanted to do. The turning point for me was The Child in Time, when political, moral, social, comic, and other possibilities moved in. Actually, it liberated me to try to capture a flow of thought. It was moving inwards in one sense, but my novels, particularly Black Dogs — and, no, The Innocent, too, which was a historical novel set in Berlin in a very specific time — it's never changed since then.

I've wanted to locate things specifically and also to merge invented worlds with real worlds. That's become a very important part of my project. Somehow, the historically real, the actual, the factual seems to enliven the invented. I like to put imaginary people in real, identifiable places. I sometimes like to mix invented characters with historical characters, which I did for the first time in The Innocent when I had George Blake as a character in the book. That has been a big shift.

There was a big gap between The Comfort of Strangers and The Child in Time, and in that time I was writing screenplays, television plays. I wrote an oratorio. Writing screenplays pulled me out of that rather bare, precise, existential kind of novel, and made me feel like I now want to draw some of this stuff back into fiction that I've been writing about in plays.

Q: There's a much-quoted line in Enduring Love: "A beginning is an artifice, and what recommends one over another is how much sense it makes of what follows." If you could speak to one of the novels and how that process unfolds: you have a story and you're trying to figure out how to tell it. The beginning may indeed be the best way to get into a story, but you may not recognize it until quite a bit of the story has been written.

McEwan: A lot of that shaping grows out of the material. It can't happen, as you say, beforehand. Something about what feels to me like the truth of what I'm doing will create a kind of structure.
Atonement is really a novel followed by two novellas followed by a sort of coda. That was the shape that just grew out of what had to happen. At some point in the back of my mind when I started, I thought I was going to write a novel within a novel, and that the first half, the stuff that's set in the country house, was going to be a complete, intact novel in itself: the novel that my central character had written. In the writing, I changed its shape. It was going to be twenty-five chapters; I pulled it down to fourteen. I realized that I wanted to follow these two characters; and even though I'd follow them in the terms that were set down at the beginning, those later chapters were also going to be written by Briony, the central character.

To give you an example of how structure grows out of content: The first half of the book moves in a kind of overlapped way, so most of the things that happen in one chapter are slightly picked up in the chapter that follows. Three of the characters have chapters in which their center of consciousness dictates the view. Briony has slightly more than the others, but her mother has some and her sister has some and Robbie has two chapters. The fact that they overlapped each other struck me as being a kind of polyphony — actually, that's why I thought of the name Tallis, because of the English composer.

I knew that kind of structure would not be appropriate for the battlefield — the battlefield section was going to be entirely Dunkirk, entirely Robbie. I wanted there to be a sense of no way out. I know any reader can put the book down, but I wanted the sense of a continuous episode, maybe with paragraph spaces, but basically a novella. It, too, would be intact, but in different terms. With that in place, I knew that the next bit was going to be Briony's, working in hospital. I thought, The counterweight will be a young woman's experience of war, not on the battlefield, but hard, tough, boring work in a hospital. That took on exactly the same structure and more or less the same length.

It's almost like having a square with two rectangles; that's how it sat in my mind. The two rectangles make another square that more or less balances — in fact, the first half of the book is 65,000 words and the other two more or less add up to 65,000. Then there's an 8,000-word coda. That's how the material simply generates structure. It's not like being an architect who has to design the whole thing before the first brick is lifted. It's rather like being a sculptor or a painter, putting things in, then smearing them out till you get the balance. Obviously, second, third, and fourth drafts are crucial in that respect, but it's usually the material that does the shaping.

Amsterdam was written as a play. I always thought of it as a comic-tragic play; it had five acts, or chapters. Very simple. It was always in my mind exactly how it was going to be. Enduring Love: a very simple structure, moving in pretty linear fashion from beginning to end. The Child in Time was dictated entirely by the period of a pregnancy because it would end with a birth.

Q: You use analogies to painting and sculpture. Also, musical references arise throughout your work. When you think about structures and shapes, do you find inspiration in other art forms?

McEwan: Directly?

Q: Not necessarily directly, but for instance in the story a classical symphony might tell, do you find correlative shapes and patterns?

McEwan: That's why structure is a lot more difficult in the novel, because you always have to bear in mind that whatever fancy schemes you have in your head, the subjective, real experience of reading it is one thing after another through time. A lot of the structure is more helpful to me, the writer, than it is to the reader.

Because even short novels are long, and because they typically contain a lot of ordinary, transitional experience, just like the day itself, a lot of it is forgotten. I know from my own experience as a reader that you're swept along by it. The more successful you are in seducing your reader into the nature and world of this fiction, the more the reader is going to forget everything that's in it. Structure has to work in pretty invisible ways.

When we listen to a Mozart symphony, as long as you know how these things work, you can hear a first theme, you can hear a second theme, you can hear an exposition. You know where you are at any given point, at least in a classical symphony or in a Beethoven sonata, and you know when to be surprised when the second theme actually contains a third. But structure there, I think, works in slightly different ways. If you're hearing the first theme elaborated in a sonata, it's not quite the same as a theme in a book. And I don't think thematically; I just stick with the material. I know more or less what I want to do with it, but it's never helpful for me to think I'm now going to write a novel about forgiveness. These abstract nouns don't really help me at all.

Q: You wrote an essay in the Guardian a few years ago about your mother. Will you someday write an autobiography?

McEwan: I did start to think about writing a short memoir with that essay as part of it, possibly even the first chapter, and then what happened? I started writing the novel I'm writing, and it sort of died on its feet. I'll resurrect it. I've got all the notes, and one of these days I will write it.
I find it hard to get drawn into it because I'm so uninterested in novelists' memoirs, myself. It's got to be something different. I very much enjoyed, and always tell him so, Martin Amis's Experience. You've got to come at a memoir with the full resources of a novelist and do something different. The idea of that was the month I met Andy Warhol in the lobby… I can't bear the thought. Or, My father was always an anxious man. Well do I remember the evenings under the… No.

Some people have a resourcefulness with their past, people like Bellow, for example, and Updike. They seem to endlessly mine it. It always feels like their past, anyway. It seems so copious, so full and rich and packed with character. Mine isn't like that, actually. When you read The Adventures of Augie March or the reflections in Herzog or various bits of Pennsylvania revived in Updike's work or New Jersey in Roth's work, you think, God, these guys are such rememberers! I can hardly remember my childhood. Or, that's not true: I can remember, but not in that degree of detail; nor has it ever been a great resource for me the way it has been for them.

It's odd you should mention that essay, which was called "Mother Tongue," because I'm going to mention it tonight in relation to fiction and nonfiction, the ways in which breaking off writing a novel to turn in that essay you promised, moving backwards and forwards across those boundaries, is actually a very important thing to be doing. One influences and shapes the other. Much of Atonement… I thought it was being derailed, but actually it was being shaped by having to stop and write things like that. I deeply resented having to write that essay, and yet I was so pleased when I had done it. I had no idea I was going to be writing about my mother. I'd promised an essay on language.

Q: You write about having your childhood friend correct you by saying "did" out loud every time you had slipped and said "done" by mistake. It's interesting to read that essay in light of your career choice, as some kind of record of a young writer gaining confidence with the language. Even since you've been publishing, over the course of your career, you seem to be using language more confidently. The characters in your earlier books don't have the same articulate nature or the confidence with language of your more recent characters.

McEwan: That's true. Even in The Comfort of Strangers: These two are educated types, but their vulnerability to what happens is very much a product of the whole range of attitudes they've developed through their education. And in the short stories many of my characters were seriously impaired in their grip on language.

On the other hand, I once wrote a short story — it was published in my second volume [In Between the Sheets] — narrated by an ape who lives with a woman who is trying to write her second novel. That's a real reflection of someone who thinks hard about fiction. And a lot of the stories did have a great deal of other literature in them, as well as music. But it's true that the kinds of people and the kind of interests I have are bound to change. Think of not changing. That would be a terror.

Q: Another quote from "Mother Tongue": "I only spoke freely on a one-to-one basis. I never acted in plays, I never spoke in class, I rarely spoke up when I was in a group of boys. Intimacy was what loosened my tongue." You were a writer waiting for a pen, it seems. In terms of getting that voice to flow, maybe you could talk about the intimacy of a writer putting words on the page for a reader.

McEwan: As I'm sure I say at some other point in that essay, I never flowed. Twenty-five years had to pass before I flowed. Even now it's a good day when things flow. With me, it's usually a sentence at a time and long pauses in between, backtracking. At the very beginning, I was fantastically hesitant and mistrustful of the language. Like my mother, I always thought it contained traps, that it would end up meaning something other than what I intended it to mean. And as I also say in that essay, I was never one of those people who think onto the page and then shape it to what they want. I always thought these sentences out in my mind, then put them down. I always had this near-superstition that by putting words on the page I'd already pre-empted the possibilities; I'd never get the thing I really wanted.

I actually have quite a tough time with writing, a lot of empty days, not moving on the next sentence. A lot of that.

Q: Who is an author you think is especially worth reading? And if someone were coming to that author for the first time, where should they begin?

McEwan: There are many I could mention, but one writer who has meant a lot to me over the years, very different from me, very prolific and whose least successful novels are still filled with various felicities on every page, is Updike. I love the naked intelligence of his prose. I love that sort of muscular quality of his. And the cool eye — I wouldn't say cold; it's a cool eye sometimes.
Where would I start? I guess I'd start with the last of the Rabbit books [Rabbit at Rest] and work backwards.

Q: Why start at the end?

McEwan: By then he had taught himself how to write those books. As all novels, you have to write them to find out how to write them. Rabbit Run has none of the authority you find in the succeeding three. And Rabbit Is Rich is nowhere near as accomplished, I think, as Rabbit at Rest, though I do like Rabbit Redux and Rabbit Is Rich. I would say, if one were beginning to write, there are two places I would start, especially with American writers. One would be the particular chapter in Bellow's Herzog where Herzog goes back to his New York apartment, showers and changes, and goes to see his lover. That's all that happens, basically, but there are just some of those superb Bellovian asides, divagations, on what it is to be a man, to be in a city, in a century, in a country, of a class, in a time....He really has that deep-sea thinking, but also caught up with a shimmering ordinariness. That chapter, which is actually about sixty or seventy pages long, I think is a masterwork, rarely equaled in any fiction.
That and the first eighty or hundred pages of Rabbit at Rest, I think, are unequaled in contemporary British writing. We don't have gray, bearded, Senator-like figures, I don't think.

Q: When one thinks of more established British fiction writers, a group that comes immediately to mind includes you and Rushdie, Amis, Barnes… I could go on. But you're all just about the same age, right?

McEwan: We were born in the late forties. Martin was born in forty-seven. I was born in forty-eight. Salman was born in forty-eight, two days before I was born. Julian was born in forty-six or forty-seven. There's William Golding, long dead, but he was a world unto himself.
We never had anything like the American project. Roth wrote about it very well in that much-quoted essay of his in Commentary. Again, it's on my mind because I'm going to quote a bit of it tonight. It was called "Writing American Fiction," and it's about how American reality constantly outstrips and embarrasses writers because they could never invent characters as vivid. The generation above us — Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch, John Fowles to some extent — they had a smaller project. That's not to say they weren't very good writers. There's a good case to make that all good writing is ultimately provincial writing; there's a bottom-up process: you build from the local. But there's something about the ambition of those three very well established writers — Roth, Updike, Bellow — that I don't even find matched in younger American writers. Don DeLillo has some great moments of ambition in this respect, but people like Updike… They're part of the last generation that really knew the names of things. Like nineteenth century novelists, Flaubert and Tolstoy, naming bits of furniture and bushes in the garden; they know the names of corners of eaves and bits of building. An English writer who knew the names of things was Angus Wilson — hardly read these days, but all the same.

Updike can do a face, too, like no one I know. You'd think he would have exhausted every possible way of describing a face, then someone walks in the room and he'll do another face just like another rabbit comes out of a hat. And they're not grotesques; they're not extreme faces. I love that book of his, Seek My Face. Extraordinary. Some great faces in that.

Q: You supplied a cover blurb for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which turned out to be one of my favorites of last year.

McEwan: An amazing success. I had no idea. I don't often give blurbs specifically for a book. I thought this one would be how I used to think Atonement was going to be: a book that might be of great interest to other writers. But it took off.

Q: It was a very well told story, but beyond that, one important quality — something that made it more than just a writerly book, as you say — was the modest size of the story. It rushed forward. It didn't linger. With its particular perspective, with Christopher's voice, had it been twice as long I'm not sure a lay reader would have carried on with it, or even taken it on to begin with. Several of your own books, Amsterdam and certainly The Comfort of Strangers, made me wonder about the idea of writing short versus writing long.

McEwan: I think writing long is an American disease. There's a view now, firmly entrenched and barely conscious, that you can't write a significant book unless it's seven or eight hundred pages long, which I think is unfortunate. It's certainly unfortunate for readers. Often, really good things are embedded in a lot of typing.

An eight hundred-page novel is thirty or thirty-five hours of a reader's commitment. Even in Anna Karenina, there are longueurs. Certainly in every Dickens novel I've read there are longueurs. No one escapes. My opinion is Always look for ways to make a novel shorter. Anything not earning its keep has to go. The opposite way of working — How can I pad this out a little more? — I think is a disastrous step. Interesting: Bellow, toward the end of his writing life, really discovered the thrill of writing short novels. He returned to his roots in things like The Actual, picking up on The Victim. Similarly, Updike had written some very long novels, including The Beauty of the Lilies, but then he wrote two little gems. One was a prequel to Hamlet, which got terrible press but I thought was wonderful, Gertrude and Claudius. Yes, length: I sort of understand the feeling. You shuffle the typescript and think, Yes, I have been working. I haven't just been lying here. You're reassured that you've done something: it's fat.

Q: You once told an interviewer that you'd like to be a rock and roll guitarist if you only knew how to play the guitar. Who is your favorite rock guitarist?

McEwan: We haven't heard much from him for a long time, but someone who's given me a lot of joy is Ry Cooder. Some of the things he did in the seventies when he got interested in mariachi music… his slide guitar was exquisite. And I love the humor in his playing, which you get in his voice, too. I recently heard for the first time in many years one of his songs, "Smack Dab in the Middle," and I thought, I'd forgotten just how good he was. Accomplished, with a jagged, raw edge to the attack on the notes. I love that. I liked his presence, the slight hilarity to his playing. A very intelligent musician, too. If you could run a lead from your head into someone else's, and I was commanded by the government to exchange whatever writing ability I had with someone else's other ability, I'd say to Ry Cooder, "You can have my writing ability; I want your playing ability." That would see my nicely through the next few decades. Let him sweat over the sentences.

BOOKS: Booker Prize Shortlist for 2004 (with summaries and short reviews)


Bitter Fruit
by Achmat Dango

While in France I met people who had fought and won the war of resistance against the Nazi occupation, only to find their lives frozen by the physical and psychological wounds of that wartime experience. I found myself comparing them to the generation involved in resistance to apartheid in South Africa: perhaps they, too, had children who saw them as stuck in the past, or emotionally crippled by "sly and self-seductive glimpses in the mirrors of their personal histories ... a need to be recognised as a 'hero of the struggle'." Of course, people are always looking back at the events and relationships that formed them - when they really lived. But the peculiar problem of apartheid in South Africa was that it gave people a warped image of themselves as being sorted by race. And resistance to it, unlike in France, ended in a compromise: "Gave us the government, kept the money."

The sense of an on-going betrayal of people's lives - in the past and into the future - is the wounded territory of Achmat Dangor's novel. Set in Johannesburg in the closing months of Nelson Mandela's presidency, it charts the open wounds and disintegrating relationships in a "coloured" family caught up in the "grey, shadowy morality" of an ANC government "bargaining, until there was nothing left to barter with, neither principle nor compromise".

Silas Ali, the father, is an old ANC activist whose government job in the justice ministry is to liaise with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A South African spin doctor, his fate is to watch the passing of his own life marginalised on TV, "as if it was foreign, fictional". His wife, Lydia, goes to work as a nurse researching HIV transmission while entrenching her distance from an emotionally shell-shocked husband. Their son, Mikey, gets caught up with Muslim activists associated with the vigilantes of Pagad, known for their involvement in the bombings of Cape Town. All the bases are touched in a reckoning with South Africa's past and present turmoil, and no box left unopened in the search for some kind of limbo or twilight zone where all unresolved conflicts might find resolution.

The novel's sense of painful disclosure is symbolised in the dark, red seeds of a split pomegranate spilling on to the cover image. Seed is a metaphor that haunts the Ali family. Mikey, the only son - a child of the "new South Africa" - discovers he was born of rape by a white policeman. A seed of contempt germinates in Mikey as he reflects on the failings of his parents' generation: "'The struggle' sowed the seeds of bright hopes and burning ideals, but look at what they are harvesting: an ordinariness." Mikey's response to these levels of deception and self-deception is an insistence on "nowness", a determination to keep his own identity open to change as he goes in murderous search of his biological father.

Rape, incest, murder - the fruits of apartheid - unfold across a story told in three acts under the headings of Memory, Confession and Retribution. It's top-heavy, perhaps, with the sins of the fathers and the heat of the action, but Dangor deftly keeps the show on the road by routing his analysis of an underlying malaise through increasingly well-drawn characters in high-profile jobs and situations. The reader has a ring-side seat for witnessing the political, cultural and religious conflicts sweeping the Rainbow Nation.

Dangor is clearly well placed, too, to describe the world of post-apartheid South Africa. He grew up in one of the "coloured" - mixed race - townships of Johannesburg, and having witnessed the kind of forced removals described in Bitter Fruit, he rose as an activist to head the Nelson Mandela Foundation in South Africa. Descriptions of the "trite, imperious feeling" of looking out from an office tower in Pretoria, or the account of an ANC "organism" with an heroic ethos turning itself into an "organisation" with a managerial one, offer acute glimpses into the political transformation after apartheid.

Yet underneath it all, a mournful river still runs, welling up in feelings both "bruised and discoloured": race, and the unreachable hurt of having lived in a racialised society. The poet takes over from the political writer in Dangor to speak it. It lingers in the imagery of fruit, of flesh, of desire - organic matter in stages of ripeness and decay, the associations of rottenness and guilt. Blond hair along a forearm is glimpsed like the bloom on a piece of fruit, and then the thought of it stifled. Hurt is bastardised with desire. Silas is "dark-faced and dark-minded". A "coloured" girl has "a rough, bastard kind of beauty". Bitter Fruit has a shocking ability to surprise the reader with the persistence of racial feeling in South Africa.


The Electric Michelangelo
by Sarah Hall

Sarah Hall's Haweswater, published less than two years ago, was a remarkable debut; with her second novel, now longlisted for the Orange prize, she confirms her status as one of the most significant and exciting of our younger novelists. Cy Parks, the "electric Michelangelo" of the novel's title, is a tattoo artist, born in the early years of the last century and seduced, when little more than a boy, by the siren song of his demanding profession. As apprentice to Eliot Riley, a foul-mouthed binge-drinker who nevertheless maintains a reputation as one of the finest tattoo artists around, Cy endures pain and humiliation, but emerges with an enhanced sense of vocation and an impressive reputation of his own.

When Riley dies, Cy leaves Morecambe, the resort where he served his apprenticeship, and sails for America. Once there, he gravitates to the surreal world of Coney Island, setting up a booth among the freak-shows and white-knuckle rides and pursuing his vocation with the quiet concentration of a man whose life has become subservient to his art. Yet that art is, in a crucially important sense, inseparable from life. Cy's canvas is the human body and, in a characteristically physical and richly imagined passage, Hall describes how the stories that gush from his clients as they sit or lie under the needle are mixed with the tattooing ink and worked back, as translations, into the broken skin.

And for all his concentration, Cy is not immune to passion. He has had experience of women almost from the beginning of his apprenticeship - clients inflamed by the pricking of the needle and eager for sex by way of finale -though without further entanglement; but his love-affair with Grace, a bareback rider and tightrope walker who enters his life shortly after the outbreak of war, is of a different order. Grace is an immigrant of indeterminate origins, a representative of suffering European womanhood: her body is explicitly characterised as a battleground, and when she weeps "all the sorrow of Europe" seems to flood from her dark eyes. She comes to Cy with the request that he tattoo her body with a single, repeated motif: a black-rimmed green eye.

In accepting the task, Cy commits himself to experiencing with unprecedented immediacy the conflict between his priestly sense of his artistic calling and the claims of the flesh he routinely handles with such privileged intimacy. The outcome of that conflict is neither simple nor decisive, but high aspiration and fleshly desire are tentatively reconciled at last in his retrospective acknowledgment that perhaps those difficult, exhilarating tattooing sessions "were the times he was making love to her after all".

The Electric Michelangelo touches on many important themes but the novel is, above all, an analysis of pain. From his earliest childhood among the consumptive guests in his mother's seaside boarding house, Cy has been forced to confront suffering. Hall brings us back repeatedly to the subject, not as a theoretical question but as palpable fact. It's hard to read - certainly hard to read without wincing - her account of the fate of Riley, dragged out to a lonely spot by unspecified enemies who break his clever, creative fingers with a claw-hammer; and even harder to read of the suffering of Grace who, for a few brief weeks after the tattooing, is able to "celebrate the identity of her body as her own sovereign state" but who fails to reckon with the vindictiveness of the affronted male psyche as embodied in Sedak, a religious fanatic who sees it as his duty to restore her decorated skin to "God's original purity of naked cleanness".

Hall certainly knows how to shock, but the shock is an essential part of a serious artistic and - in the best sense - moral enterprise. And she also understands the value of reticence. Somewhere behind the events described in detail in these pages lies the carnage of a world war, the terror of the Holocaust; yet the reminders of the larger picture are offered with a careful obliquity simultaneously suggestive of artistic tact and a sharp awareness of connection.

There's evidence in the detail of the text that the novel has been edited with rather greater haste than was good for it, but this doesn't significantly affect its essential virtues. The Electric Michelangelo is a work of unusual imaginative power and range, and it deserves a wide readership.



Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell

It's hard not to become ensnared by words beginning with the letter B, when attempting to describe Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's third novel. It's a big book, for start, bold in scope and execution--a bravura literary performance, possibly. (Let's steer clear of breathtaking for now.) Then, of course, Mitchell was among Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and his second novel number9dreamwas shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Characters with birthmarks in the shape of comets are a motif; as are boats. Oh and one of the six narratives strands of the book--where coincidentally Robert Frobisher, a young composer, dreams up "a sextet for overlapping soloists" entitled Cloud Atlas--is set in Belgium, not far from Bruges. (See what I mean?)

Structured rather akin to a Chinese puzzle or a set of Matrioshka dolls, there are dazzling shifts in genre and voice and the stories leak into each other with incidents and people being passed on like batons in a relay race. The 19th-century journals of an American notary in the Pacific that open the novel are subsequently unearthed 80 years later on by Frobisher in the library of the ageing, syphilitic maestro he's trying to fleece. Frobisher's waspish letters to his old Cambridge crony, Rufus Sexsmith, in turn surface when Rufus, (by the 1970s a leading nuclear scientist) is murdered. A novelistic account of the journalist Luisa Rey's investigation into Rufus' death finds its way to Timothy Cavendish, a London vanity publisher with an author who has an ingenious method of silencing a snide reviewer. And in a near-dystopian Blade Runner-esque future, a genetically engineered fast food waitress sees a movie based on Cavendish's unfortunate internment in a Hull retirement home. (Cavendish himself wonders how a director called Lars might wish to tackle his plight). All this is less tricky than it sounds, only the lone "Zachary" chapter, told in Pacific Islander dialect (all "dingos'n'ravens", "brekker" and "f'llowin'"s) is an exercise in style too far. Not all the threads quite connect but nonetheless Mitchell binds them into a quite spellbinding rumination on human nature, power, oppression, race, colonialism and consumerism.

“In a bold and unconventionally structured work, David Mitchell combines the stories of six individuals to create a masterful whole, which is both thought provoking and incredibly exhilarating. The morality and ambitions of a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified ‘dinery server’ on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation echo and impact on each others stories and point to a terrifying vision of the world’s future and challenges our ability to shape not only our destiny but those that will come after us.”


The Master
by Colm Tóibín

There's little in Colm Tóibín's previous work, to some of which this reviewer has been immune or even mildly allergic, to prepare for the startling excellence of his new novel. The Master is a portrait of Henry James that has the depth and finish of great sculpture. For decades now, anyone interested in this fascinating, infuriating figure has been unfailingly directed to Leon Edel's massive biography (which has pride of place in Tóibín's acknowledgments). It may be time at last to change the signposts. The Master pays ample homage to James, without suppressing a prickle of critique.

The pillars of the narrative are failure, avoidance, renunciation and withdrawal. Unpromising quartet, but appropriate to a life without obvious eventfulness, and a work with a strong, negative dynamic, structured round the missed opportunity, the faulty choice, the golden bowl with its latent crack, the 'beast in the jungle' whose annihilating leap is delayed and delayed.
Tóibín's starting point is the most painful public event of James's life, the dramatic failure of a drama. On the disastrous opening night of James's play Guy Domville, the applause of James's friends was drowned out by the jeering of an audience that wanted incident and emotion, not anaemia in three acts. After this fiasco, James reconsecrated himself to fiction, but first he visited Ireland, hoping to escape the echoes of his London failure.

Tóibín shows James missing nothing, but refusing almost everything as literary material or personal priority. On these pages, he abstains in short order from politics, history, sexuality and the expression of emotion. He has the exile's advantage and handicap, of being 'too alert... to be able to participate'. He sees the grotesque shams of British rule, but doesn't adopt anti-imperialism as a cause, as his tragic sister Alice had. An impertinent stranger seeks to humiliate him by referring to his family's humble Irish roots, and a woman he had imagined his friend makes no protest. He leaves their company as soon as he can, but even the sting of British snobbery isn't enough to make him find his origins interesting.

Returned to London, and writing again, James receives regular bulletins about Oscar Wilde. It was a play of Wilde's that he attended on that terrible first night, being too keyed-up to watch his own, and it was another piece of Wilde's which replaced Guy Domville. Now that Wilde has his own disaster, James listens attentively but without betraying any personal interest. Edmund Gosse wonders if James himself might not have some secrets to protect, which would make the night boat to France attractive, but as James hears the details of the scandal, it is the fate of Wilde's abandoned children which touches his heart and imagination.

Wilde functions in the book rather as he did in Stoppard's play about AE Housman, as an anti-type. Wilde was a self-destructive butterfly, a florid imago torn by the beaks of the law and the press, while others remained at the pupal, even the larval stage of eroticism. Nevertheless, Tóibín has had the courage and tact to include one scene of something like sexual experience for the young James. This is a remarkable feat, given that James naked was some thing that even James seems to have had difficulty imagining.

The novel covers a period of five years, during which James was becoming, indeed, 'the Master'. It also deals with earlier passages in his life, from childhood on. In Tóibín's understanding, and perhaps also in James's, the past everywhere underlies the present without doing anything as dreary as explaining it. Looking back, James takes the measure of his own consecrated egotism, which led for instance to asymmetrical intimacies with clever women. Their needs engaged and moved him, without abolishing the tender distance from which he observed them.

One extraordinary passage deals with the Civil War, a cataclysm supported by the unpredictable Henry James Snr, but one from which both William James (whose later fame was as a psychologist and philosopher of religion) and Henry Jnr managed to exempt themselves, though a younger brother fought and suffered horribly. On the day that Wilky James's regiment, the famous 54th (notable for its large number of black volunteers) left Boston with much pomp, William had an important laboratory experiment to perform, while Henry wrote to his mother that back pain might prevent his attending. He was having a relapse of the hypochondria in which she had colluded.

Tóibín's writing, though, finds something in Henry's state of mind beyond cowardice or guilt, a keynote softly being struck: 'When everyone else had fire in their blood, he was calm. So calm that he could neither read nor think, merely bask in the freedom that the afternoon offered, savour, as deeply as he could, this quiet and strange treachery, his own surreptitious withdrawal from the world.' It's possible to feel that the greatness of James's mind was a sort of immense littleness.

The habit of avoiding conflict was deeply ingrained in James. As Tóibín describes it, when his butler at Lamb House in Rye became a habitual drunkard, James's preferred solution was to eliminate soups and gravies from the menu, substances which betrayed lurching, and to seat his guests with their backs to the dining-room door, so that they wouldn't observe Smith's robotic progress out of the room.

The least successful passages in the book are the ones that deal with James turning anecdotes or observations into stories and novels. He observes an ambiguous child playing at innocence. What Maisie Knew! He hears about an American paying court to a great-niece of a lover of Byron, his real interest being some literary remains of Shelley. The Aspern Papers! Reading an old letter from his great friend, the invalid Minny Temple, he imagines a suitor for her, who would embody in more active form his own mixture of devotion and betrayal. The Wings of the Dove!
James's style is one of the most distinctive in the language, somehow surviving both self-parody and parody, from Beerbohm to Louis Wilkinson/ Marlow (in whose scurrilous version even an ejaculation in a gentleman's library becomes 'a devolvulently blanching stain').

Tóibín has been wise about which elements to adopt, which to jettison. He borrows James's vocabulary and register, but not the whole manner. Above all, he abstains from the long sentence, which made so many of James's effects possible - the oracular murmur, the air of paralysed scruple, the flaunted subtlety (God, how the man could badger a nuance). There was always wit in James, but the long sentence drowned it.

Those long sentences were tracts of prose in which James could play, sing and spout like a frock-coated whale, or else disappear inside a cloud of his own secreted ink like a giant squid of New England gentility. We shall not read their like again, with any luck. At the beginning of the book, Tóibín can only be at a disadvantage, since his writing is so much thinner in texture than the original, but long before its end he has achieved a triumph on his own terms.

Summary: “In The Master, Colm Tóibín tells the story of Henry James, an American-born genius of the modern novel who became a connoisseur of exile, living among artists and aristocrats in Paris, Rome, Venice and London. In January 1895 James anticipates the opening of his first play in London. He has never been so vulnerable, nor felt so deeply unsuited to the public gaze. When the production fails, he returns, chastened, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost. Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man whose artistic gifts made his career a triumph but whose private life was haunted by loneliness and longing, and whose sexual identity remained unresolved. Henry James circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, he was lauded and admired, yet his attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love.”


I'll Go to Bed at Noon
by Gerard Woodword

Depicting alcoholism in fiction requires a steady hand, and a clear head for sensing when lurid excess becomes as repulsive and dull in invention as it does in real life. But handled with care, the rewards are high, not least because the fictions that tend to cohere around addiction -- the grandiosity of need and satisfaction, the delusions and justifications of denial -- are so rich in ingenuity and conviction. For the Jones family, who were first sighted in Gerard Woodward's Whitbread-shortlisted first novel, August (2001), such fictions have become a modus operandi, vital to their rackety and compromised survival.

Colette and Aldous, mater- and pater-familias, conjure their determination to continue from a limited wherewithal. Colette has her own history of dependency to deal with, having previously developed and conquered a reliance on Romac, the glue from puncture-repair kits, and even now can only get to sleep with the aid of a few glasses of barley wine, her "wonder-drink", and a handful of Nembutals. Come the morning, and only another refreshing cup of fizzy wine can dispel her grogginess. It is unsurprising that she should need both sedative and stimulant to help her deal with reality, since the couple's lives have shrunk to the timorous tedium of anticipating, containing and recovering from the unpredictable rampages of their drunken eldest son, Janus.
Janus, a gifted pianist whose temperament now makes it virtually impossible for him to hold down even the most menial of jobs, thinks nothing of surreptitiously cutting out the bathroom pipes in order to pay for a few cans of Special Brew; of ransacking his parents' treasure troves for the same purpose; of flouting court injunctions and filching brains from hospital mortuaries. With his brother-in-law, Bill, a bohemian painter-turned-supermarket-butcher, he mounts imaginary expeditions to discover the source of the Limpopo, although his primary quarry is usually the mythical "Red Lion", whose "roars can be heard echoing about the eucalyptus and banyan trees". Barred from most of the pubs within easy reach of Windhover Hill, the fictional North London suburb in which the novel is set, and losing friends with each display of violent and capricious behaviour, Janus is swiftly moving closer to the margins of the respectable middle-class life to which the rest of the Jones clan stubbornly cling.

Woodward sets Janus's decline into lawlessness and self-provoked exile against that facade of respectability with impressive subtlety, evoking at the same time a precise sense of life in 1970s suburbia. Colette and Aldous's house boasts a music room, and they recoil in horror at the philistinism represented by a relative's bookless High Wycombe house, and yet their own home, under the onslaught of Janus's depredations, borders on the insanitary and slum-like.
Elsewhere, Colette's widowed brother, Janus Brian, slides into dilapidation by distilling all that his garden has to offer; when the tomato sherry and brussel-sprout whisky run out, he turns to a tin of shoe polish, hoping to extract its alcoholic essence with the aid of a kettle. It doesn't work, and Janus Brian's sole comfort is his insistence that his past simply doesn't exist, that memory is nothing but a dream. "Life must be real", insists Colette, "if I was making all this up, surely I'd make up a better life for myself". You can see her point; the demands of her family are a nagging distraction from the social and domestic pleasures that the creeping sophistication of the decade has to offer, with its parties garnished with sandwich gateaux and stilton mousses, its pubs transformed by bamboo, wickerwork and foliage, and its Sundays set off by sedate drives into London's leafy Home Counties hinterlands. In a section of the novel in which part of the family decamps to Tewkesbury on holiday, a less ragged life is glimpsed, one that, for Aldous, is defined by his ability to create and protect his own solitude. Colette's problem is that she has a foot in both camps and that, for all her terror and despair at Janus's solipsistic rage, she would quite like to join him. "You'd be happier if the whole world was drunk", rails Julian, the precocious youngest son who dreams of a gun with which to kill Janus, and he is not far wrong.

Gerard Woodward's narrative proceeds at a finely judged pace, its vivid set pieces exploding into the quiet flow of day-to-day living. In similar style, he carefully rations the novel's seductive moments of caperish humour and nicely modulated wit, balancing them with an intelligent and frequently moving sense of pathos. This is a clever and accurate mimicry of drunkenness itself, of its combination of sharp releases of energy and emotion and its sapping sense of self-exhaustion and diminishing returns. The drunken antics of the Jones family and their circle might not be much fun to live among, but in I'll Go to Bed at Noon their fictional existence capivates and appals in equal measure.

Summary: “Colette Jones has had drink problems in the past, but now it seems as though her whole family is in danger of turning to alcohol. Her oldest son has thrown away a promising musical career for a job behind the counter in builders’ merchants, and his drinking sprees with his brother-in-law Bill, a pseudo-Marxist supermarket butcher who seems to see alcohol as central to the proletarian revolution, have started to land him in trouble with the police. Meanwhile Colette’s recently widowered older brother is following an equally self-destructive path, having knocked back an entire cellar of homemade wine, he’s now on the gin, a bottle a day and counting. Who will be next? Her youngest son had decided to run away to sea, but when her own husband hits the bottle Colette realises she has to act. As the pressure builds on Colette to cope with these damaged people, her own weaknesses begin to emerge, and become crucial to the outcome of all their lives.”

www.bookerprize.co.uk

MUSIC: SONGLIST FOR SEPTEMBER 21, 2004

The Outsiders - REM
I Wanted to be Wrong - REM
Ascent of Man - REM
Aftermath - REM
Don't Explain - Nina Simone
Aria da capo - Glenn Gould
Astral Weeks - Van Morrison





"What's the frequency, Kenneth?" is your Benzedrine, uh-huhI was brain-dead, locked out, numb, not up to speedI thought I'd pegged you an idiot's dreamTunnel vision from the outsider's screenI never understood the frequency, uh-huhYou wore our expectations like an armored suit, uh-huhI'd studied your cartoons, radio, music, TV, movies, magazinesRichard said,"Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy"A smile like the cartoon, tooth for a toothYou said that irony was the shackles of youthYou wore a shirt of violent green, uh-huhI never understood the frequency, uh-huh"What's the frequency, Kenneth?" is your Benzedrine, uh-huhButterfly decal, rear-view mirror, dogging the sceneYou smile like the cartoon, tooth for a toothYou said that irony was the shackles of youthYou wore a shirt of violent green, uh-huhI never understood the frequency, uh-huhYou wore our expectations like an armored suit, uh-huhI couldn't understandYou said that irony was the shackles of youth, uh-huhI couldn't understandYou wore a shirt of violent green, uh-huhI couldn't understandI never understood,don't fuck with me, uh-huh

MUSIC and FILM

Garden State:

Andrew Largeman, the hero of "Garden State," is almost catatonic when first we see him. He's flat on his back under an unwrinkled white sheet on a white bed in a white room with no other furnishings, except for an answering machine, which is recording a message from his father informing him that his mother has drowned in the bathtub. Andrew gets up and looks into his medicine cabinet, where every shelf is filled with neatly arranged rows of prescription drugs.
We learn in the following scenes that Andrew is a would-be actor (he played a retarded quarterback on a made-for-cable movie), works in a Vietnamese restaurant, has not been home to New Jersey in nine years and is overmedicated. When he leaves all the pills behind before flying home for the funeral, his life begins to budge again.
"Garden State" was written and directed by Zach Braff, who stars as Andrew. He has one of those faces, like David Schwimmer's, that seems congenitally dubious. He returns home to his father, Gideon (Ian Holm), who is very dry and distant, masking anger: Gideon is a psychiatrist who believes Andrew will never be well "until you forgive yourself for what you did to your mother." What Andrew did, in Gideon's mind, was to make the woman into a paraplegic by pushing her so that she fell over the door of a dishwasher. What Andrew believes is that he was a very small boy, the dishwasher had a broken latch, and his father is full of it.
Andrew's new life begins when he recognizes the gravediggers at his mother's funeral. These are high school buddies he left behind. Soon he's high on ecstasy and playing spin-the-bottle at a party, and not long after that he's unexpectedly in love. She is Sam (Natalie Portman), a local girl who is one of those creatures you sometimes find in the movies, a girl who is completely available, absolutely desirable and really likes you. Portman's success in creating this character is all the more impressive because we learn almost nothing about her, except that she's great to look at and has those positive attributes.
The movie joins Andrew, Sam and his high school buddy Mark (Peter Sarsgaard) on an odyssey through the wilds of New Jersey, which contain stranger denizens than Oz. Mark is a stoner with a wide range of interesting friends, including a couple who live in a boat at the bottom of a stone quarry, and a high school classmate who's made millions with the invention of silent Velcro ("it doesn't make that noise when you pull it apart").
Andrew is awakening gradually from a long, sedated nothingness. He tries to communicate with his father, he tries to reconnect with his feelings, and mostly he tries to deal with the enormous puzzle that Sam represents. What is he to do about her? His romantic instincts have been on hold for so long he's like a kid with his first girlfriend.
"Garden State" inspires obvious comparisons with "The Graduate," not least in the similarity of the two heroes; both Benjamin and Andrew are passive, puzzled and quizzical in the face of incoming exhortations. The presence of Simon and Garfunkel on the sound- track must not be entirely coincidental. But "The Graduate" is a critique of the world Benjamin finds himself in, and "Garden State" is the world's critique of Andrew. All of the people he meets are urging him, in one way or another, to wake up and smell the coffee. All except for his father, whose anger is so deep, he prefers his son medicated into a kind of walking sleep. Ian Holm plays the role with perfect pitch, making small emotional adjustments instead of big dramatic moves.
This is not a perfect movie; it meanders and ambles and makes puzzling detours. But it's smart and unconventional, with a good eye for the perfect detail, as when Andrew arrives at work in Los Angeles and notices that the spigot from a gas pump, ripped from its hose when he drove away from a gas station, is still stuck in his gas tank. Something like that tells you a lot about a person's state of mind.

Such Great Heights from Soundtrack:
"i am thinking it's a sign that the freckles in our eyes are mirror images and when we kiss they're perfectly alignedi would like to speculate that god himself did make us into corresponding shapes like puzzle pieces from the clayand true, it may seem like a stretch, but its thoughts like this that catch my troubled head when you're away and i am missing you to deathwhen you are out there on the road for several weeks of shows and whenyou scan the radio, i hope this song will guide you homethey will see us waving from such great heights, "come down now,"they'll say but everything looks perfect from far away,"come down now," but we'll stay...i tried my best to leave this all on your machine but the persistent beatit sounded thin upon listeningand that frankly will not fly, you will hear the shrillest highs and lowest lows with the windows down when this is guiding you home."

ART



Georgian Bay in September

Songlist for September 9th, 2004

Leaving New York - REM
Go - Sparklehorse
True Love Will Find You in the End - Beck
The Day After Tomorrow - Tom Waits
Radio Cure - Wilco
Masters of War - Pearl Jam (live at Benaroya Hall)
Where is the Line? - Bjork
Bombed - Mark Lanegan Band
Like a Monkey in the Zoo - Vic Chesnutt
Living Life - eels
Come as you are - Caetano Veloso
Oceania (kelis remix) - Bjork
Just in Time - Nina Simone (live)
God Only Knows - Michael Stipe and Mandy Moore
If - Telly Savales
I'll run your hurt away - Ruby Johnson
Everyone deserves music - Michael Franti
Passing Afternoon - Iron & Wine
Mercy Mercy Me - Marvin Gaye