We will remember them

The Missing Of The Somme by Geoff Dyer

Following on from Sebastian Barry's superb A Long Long Way, my Great War education continues with the equally superb The Missing Of The Somme by Geoff Dyer. Anyone who has read anything by Dyer before will know that his books don't easily fall into any particular category. Combining elements of travel writing, literary criticism, art appreciation and cultural commentary he isn't so much a jack of all trades as a polymath, capable of using his wider knowledge to show things in a fresh light. In this book he set out

'...to write a book that was not about 'the War itself but the effect of the idea of [the War] on my generation'. Not a novel but an essay in mediation: research notes for a Great War novel I had no intention of writing, the themes of a novel without its substance.'

When first writing my thoughts on Barry's novel I attempted to articulate the sense of familiarity one has with the Great War. We know what we're going to get when we read a novel, play or even poem from that period. In fact, enough time has passed now for that familiarity to develop into something else. Or as Dyer more eloquently puts it.

'The problem with many recent novels about the war is that they almost inevitably bear the imprint of the material from which they are derived, can never conceal the research on which they depend for their historical and imaginative accuracy. We have...entered the stage of second-order pastiche:pastiche of pastiche.'

I think that's where my sense of familiarity comes from and Dyer is able to find a new perspective not just on the modes of artistic expression of our remembrance but even on the artists behind it. For many people the artistic experience of the war comes through the poetry of Owen and Sasson and their pervasive influence is shown clearly in this book. But what Dyer also highlights is a slightly more surprising view of these two spokesmen for the war and its horrors.

'We have become so accustomed to thinking of the slaughter of war that we forget that the slaughtered were themselves would be slaughterers. Owen personally "inflicted considerable losses on the enemy" when he captured a machine gun and Graves recalls that he "had never seen such a fire-eater as [Sasson]- the number of Germans whom I killed or caused to be killed could hardly be compared with his wholesale slaughter."'

This hardly chimes with our picture of the soldier-poets, or not with mine anyway, and this is typical of Dyer, puncturing the received picture of things. The very idea of remembrance is turned on its head when he points out that those famous words repeated each year on Remembrance Day:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

that seem 'not to have been written but to have pulsed into life in the nation's collective memory' were actually written in 1914 before the fallen actually fell. Making it a work 'not of remembrance but of the anticipation of remembrance.' With such a long running war this theme returns again and again from the front, the command that we must never forget even whilst the slaughter continues around them.

A large part of the book is taken up by his appraisal of the various monuments of remembrance both here and on the continent. He is brilliant not only at decoding the signals and meaning contained within these sculptures but also at finding the evocative description that can help us, the reader, to see and feel them almost as tangibly as he can. He also does this with the various photographs which pepper the text. One monument communicates in bronze and stone the heaviness of the soldier's life.

'Every piece of equipment looks like it weighs a ton...Things were made of iron and wood, even cloth looks like it has been woven from iron filings.'

From here Dyer develops his theme pointing out that the future is always getting lighter, hence the weight of the past. In another photograph, a panorama of the aftermath at Paschendaele by the Canadian William Rider-Rider, Dyer uses the language of the art historian to explain its effectiveness before allowing his own skills as a writer to find the perfect finish to this image of desolation.

'Instead of receding into the distance these trees disappear beyond the edges of the frame. There is no perspective. The vanishing point is no longer a more or less exact point, but all around. A new kind of infinity: more of the same in every direction, an infinity of waste. The sky lies in tatters in the mud.'

It is a testament to this short book that my review is made up in large part of quotations from it, and there are still plenty of other markers in my copy; images and observations that would be worthy of a mention here. In examining how we remember Dyer finds many genuinely enlightening ways to remind us exactly why we must.

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'did I say those words?'

I know he's a soft target but if you ever need something to bring a smile to your face quickly old George W is always on hand with a Bushism or two. Now, thanks to the Guardian's random generator, incomprehension is only a click away. Admit it: you'll miss him when he's gone.


BUSH UPDATE: It's so good it deserves to be posted up here too (thanks for the link John)


Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

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there's no business like monkey business

Me Cheeta
by...erm, Cheeta

In the run up to Christmas you ran the risk of being buried alive by the towering stacks of celebrity autobiographies on sale at half price in WHSmith. We just can't get enough of the inside track on the lives of the rich and famous (even when the term 'life' may only refer to the ghost-written reminiscences of a twenty-year old). But where's the glamour and the romance? Enter Cheeta, film star and Guinness World Record holder as the world's oldest non-human primate (76 years and counting) who, in this satirical take on the Hollywood memoir, gives us a unique perspective on the Golden Age of cinema. I'll apologise now for the liberal use of quotation but it's just one of those books.

Plucked from millions of hopefuls in the jungles of Liberia, Cheeta (or 'Jiggs' as he is officially documented - 'As is almost traditional in these cases, my name was misspelled at Immigration') tells us first of his liberation from the jungle. This rose-tinted view makes his journey across the Atlantic in a crate a period of 'rehabilitation' consisting 'of almost permanent darkness, coupled with a total lack of potentially distressing or dangerous social interaction, and strictly no exercise.' With this naive perspective it is all too obvious that we are supposed to see us humans as the cruel, manipulative sadists we are. And this is before he's even reached Hollywood.

This early section is only partly successful. The reverse anthropomorphism (zoomorphism?), whereby Cheeta sees the world around him like the social hierarchies of the jungle, makes the studio bosses 'the seven Alphas' of Hollywood and almost the whole of Western civilisation an attempt 'to attract the attention of some sexually receptive females'. But the faux naivety is a bit too cute, even for Cheeta himself who interrupts some of his own long winded descriptions. Having dropped a few cracking judgements early on (Rex Harrison for example: 'an absolutely irredeemable cunt who tried to murder me') it is the searing put downs we want more of and he has plenty of them.

As a comedian himself he is uniquely placed to comment on Charlie Chaplin 'the Utopian dolt, satyromaniac, cradle-snatcher, self-mythologizer and (need I say it?) sentimentalist.'

'...the garnering of critical acclaim has never meant much to me -quite unlike the role it played in Charlie's life, which was pretty similar to the role morphine played in Bela Lugosi's, or the erect male sexual organ in dear, sweet Mary Astor's, which is to say, he was hopelessly dependent upon it.'

Ouch! Not just one hit but three in a single sentence. Sometimes he's subtle, 'I retain a loathing for two things in particular (three if you count Mickey Rooney).' other times less so, 'If Dietrich was a good German, I thought, then the bad ones must be absolutely fucking terrifying.' But most of the time he's deliciously salacious especially with his co star the 'inimitable' Maureen O'Hara ('in reality highly imitable. I myself can do a reasonable Maureen O'Hara by simply screeching as loudly as I can and flinging my excrement around').

So, where's the romance? Well there is one human whom Cheeta admires and loves above all others of course, Johnny Weissmuller.

'...this silvery-white creature on the screen was the paragon of animals, the ultimate alpha. You looked at him and thought - the rest of us? We're just beasts. If you can come up with something as beautiful as that, well, then, maybe you're right: we ought to obey you.'

The evocation of their relationship is filled with warmth, affection and moments of genuine insight. The moment when they are reunited, this heroic figure now physically ruined by strokes, reduces Johnny to sobs and may well have you tearing up too. Weissmuller went through several marriages, yet may never have found a more loyal companion than his simian co-star. You find yourself filled with sympathy for this gentle giant who ended his life both broke and broken despite never really having done anything wrong. Even Cheeta has recognised earlier the simple facts of the matter:

'If you're a star, Hollywood is a playground, and if you're not,they're right, it is a jungle. It's a town of heartless bottom-lines and harsh decisions and betrayals so ugly that from time to time the very earth beneath it shudders in contempt, like its teeth have been set on edge.'

It is as a satire of Hollywood, and everything that word seems to mean, that this book really excels. The put-downs are often laugh out loud funny (although with the book being a little too long you find some of the same jokes returning with diminishing effect) and the persist ant rumours about the exact nature of Cheeta's relationship with Dolores del Rio will keep you guessing to the end. We read books like these because we want to know what it feels like to be famous but despite the golden hue there is something sad about the conclusions of 'perhaps the most famous animal alive today'.

'...picture a human and a chimpanzee facing each other in awkward silence, with nothing to be said, the faint inanity of the interaction stealing over both of them. That's what fame is. '




(And for those of you wondering who the real author is (bless you if you believed it might really be just him and a typewriter) this insider tale of LA excess comes from James Lever, Oxford-educated son of a High Court judge.)

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the appliance of science

Bad Science
by Ben Goldacre

Growing up with a Consultant Dermatologist for a father made cosmetics commercials an entertaining experience. You know the sort; 'contains pentipeptides and our most advanced Q10 complex', 'now with Vitamin E and Ceramide R'. My dad was able to translate what lay behind the bamboozling techno-babble, most of the words in those days tended to mean nothing more complicated than 'water' and vitamin E is used in most creams as a preservative but the word vitamin makes it sound like an active ingredient. He also used to point out that the whole point about skin is that it's waterproof, it's designed to stop stuff getting into your body, so most of the very expensive rubbish being advertised tends to just sit on top, contracting skin to 'reduce the appearance of wrinkles' as they very carefully phrase it nowadays. The single most effective thing to put on your skin was, and still is, humble Vaseline (in fact it's amazing that Vaseline don't make more of that) but there's not very much money in that.

Following on from his Guardian column of the same name Ben Goldacre, a doctor and journalist, has published Bad Science, where he attempts to engage us in the science that we are all subjected to and persuaded by on an almost daily basis. He is not a happy man. Not so much because people get things wrong, or portray them inaccurately but because the science behind it isn't really that complex. In fact the revelation of this book is not so much that he lays into some soft targets like Gillian McKeith ('or, to give her full medical title: Gillian McKeith') or homeopathy, giving us all a giggle along the way, but that he attempts to arm us all with the basic scientific tools that will help us to smell a rat. After all, most of what we get now in the press and on the television is statistics and we all know that there are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics.

When I was about 13 at school I once convinced my class that red apples could give you cancer. Having learnt the word 'carcinogenic' (those medical parents can really help you sound clever sometimes) I was able to use that a few times along with pigment and sound terribly convincing even though every word was absolute nonsense. I decided to use my skills as a bullshitter by pursuing a career in acting, but it turns out that they would also have qualified me to be an excellent nutritionist (a title which after all requires no actual qualifications). McKeith is taken to task here for portraying herself as a bonafide medical authority, making very sciencey sounding statements and peppering her books with sciencey looking reference numbers, underneath which there are some fairly glaring and basic scientific errors. Some digging behind her credentials makes things a little clearer. All of which is grist to the mill for someone like me who has always had a dislike of her and her humiliation tactics. If you want some ammunition against 'the awful poo lady' then look no further.

I have also had a personal experience of homeopathy (before I really understood what it all was). I had a touch of the man-flu, was given a pill and told to go to bed with my clothes on, pull the duvet over my head and sweat it out (the pill would aid this by opening the capillaries and aiding blood flow right to the skin's surface). When I woke in the morning after a hot night I felt fine, great in fact and put it all down to the pill. This is the beauty of the placebo. If you believe in the pill, it might just do the trick (which is a gross simplification of the cultural significance of the placebo - explained in much greater detail by Goldacre). It is the fact that the placebo is so interesting a phenomenon, worthy of attention and study, rather than the new-agey sounding nonsense about the 'memory' of water explaining how a substance which has been so diluted as to contain not one molecule of the original substance could have any medical benefit (beyond that of the placebo), which really gets his goat. If homeopathy was to come clean and present itself as a benign resource like horoscopes and crystal dowsing then it might just get away with it but when you read about someone like Peter Chapell, a homeopath who has developed a remedy that can be used to treat the HIV virus, or Matthias Rath who claimed his vitamin treatments could do the same (and who recently dropped his libel case against The Guardian), it makes me think very dark thoughts.

I was really interested to read this book because of the final chapter on the MMR vaccine. Being a young parent means that you are literally bombarded with information, advice, statistics, theories and good old-fashioned fearful paranoia and I'll admit that my steadfast rational approach to just about everything had encountered a little wavering when it came to making a decision that could impact on someone else's life. Goldacre doesn't exactly come out and say it but by calling the chapter The Media's MMR Hoax and showing that after several years of scare-mongering there is no evidence to support a link between the jab and autism, he helped put the issue to bed for me.

The role of the media is a large focus of the book unsurprisingly and it is almost gobsmacking to see how poorly researched, written and constructed some of the stories we have all read really are. The fact that the results which fuelled the MRSA superbug stories came from a poorly qualified man, out of depth and working out of his garden shed would be funny if it weren't so serious (especially given his untimely death from a car accident shortly after the facts of the matter were exposed). The pressure on journalists to provide stories with punchy headlines and stats that have impact leads to a fudging of the numbers, very basic and very misleading mistakes. The pressure on papers to maintain advertising revenue means that articles which should really be written by science correspondents are given to lifestyle or comment writers who don't use the science writers at their disposal to check the science. That's why it might be worth checking out the Bad Science website next time you read that cocaine use amongst schoolchildren has doubled or that you should be drinking gallons of purple grape juice due to its high level of antioxidants.

Science can be complex, but bad science is often pretty simple. Goldacre's book is eye-opening and provocative whilst always attempting to be fair rather than personally vindictive (well, he almost pulls that one off). It could have been better ordered, powered as it is by the digressive and slightly chaotic energy of a self-confessed geek but what's refreshing is that he credits his readers with some intelligence and places the ball firmly in our court.

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'there is no such thing as an uninteresting life'

A Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry

A book which has languished on my TBR pile for at least two years finally made its way into my hands after another strong recommendation and the window which opened as I awaited gifts from Santa. Until I read Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies this year I had always been wary of fiction from the Indian subcontinent. I have no idea why, but it is an area of the world I hadn't travelled to, wasn't really drawn towards and I had a suspicion that the reverence with which people often speak about it might be evident in the fiction it inspires, leading to a less than satisfying reading experience. Well, that's prejudice for you. Mistry's large and impressive novel has its reverential moments and is certainly not without faults but set against the background of the Emergency in India of the 1970's he tells a story which manages to be both epic and domestic, political and personal, written a style which is comfortingly old-fashioned and yet shot through with moments of startling violence.

We meet our four main characters in a prologue, or rather it is they who meet. On a train into Mumbai, young Maneck Kohlah drops his study books onto Ishvar Darji and his nephew Omprakash. It transpires that they are all travelling to meet the same woman, Dina Dalal; Maneck as a lodger and Ishvar and Om as tailors looking for employment. Having brought the four of them together Mistry then uses the next 250 pages to look back at what has brought them to that point. The two tailors have made a journey not only of geographical distance but of caste. Born into the untouchable Chamaar caste of tanners, where a living was scraped by waiting for other's animals to die, Ishvar's father, in defiance of what is acceptable, apprenticed him to his friend Ashraf, a Muslim tailor, in the hope that he would be able to make that leap into a profession. That it is a Muslim he is apprenticed to allows us to see the conflict within an independent India. As troubles flare between Hindu and Muslim the two young apprentices are able in a single act to save the lives of Ashraf and his family, unaware that they are powerless to help their own family as they come into conflict with the landlords in their attempts to exercise their democratic right to vote.

Maneck has left an isolated life in the mountains in order to pursue an education. He too is looking to better himself but safe in the knowledge that his father's business is there for him to take over in the future. His back story has less impact but works its charms through his ever optimistic parents. His father's store is central to the lives of the rural community, the secret of that success his secret soft drink formula, Kohlah's Cola. Even when his father loses an eye whilst bottling he's a glass-half-full kind of man.

'"One eye is sufficient for the things I am looking forward to seeing," he smiled, touching his wife's swollen belly. Whereas, he added, the ugliness of the world would now trouble him only half as much.'

This is typical of Mistry who is careful never to let things get too rosy before redressing the balance. For Dina this is especially true in spite of her relatively privileged background. She endures a fractious relationship with her domineering brother and seeks to live independently from him. Even when she frustrates her brother's attempts to find a suitable husband by falling in love and finding one for herself it isn't the escape she hopes for and her independence is always tenuous at best. Hence her need for both a lodger and employees to help with her clothing manufacture business.

Having established their backgrounds the novel really takes flight as their lives become closely entwined, stitched together like the quilt that Dina works on throughout the novel - made up from the remnants of fabric she salvages from each consignment. The quilt becomes a textile chronology of their time together an image signalled earlier in the novel, '"If time were a bolt of cloth," said Om, "I would cut out all the bad parts. Snip out the scary nights and stitch together the good parts, to make time bearable. Then I would wear it like a coat, always live happily."' And yet when he recognises one square of the quilt as from the day he and Ishvar lost their homes and Dina offers to cut it out he is more philosophical:

'"Calling one piece sad is meaningless. See, it is connected to a happy piece - sleeping on the verandah. And the next square - chapatis. Then that violet trusser, when we made masala wada and started cooking together. And don't forget this georgette patch, where Beggarmaster saved us from the landlord's goondas."
He stepped back, pleased with himself, as though he had elucidated an intricate theorem. "So that's the rule to remember, the whole quilt is much more important than any single square.'

Mistry is careful to undercut the philosophy (or 'fakeology' as the two tailors call it), always trying to steer a course away from the reverence I mentioned earlier. There are two reasons for this. Firstly there is the rich humour. The gentle joshing or plain hilarity in the face of those oh-so-wise moments is one aspect. But there is also a keen satirical edge to it too. On another train journey Maneck meets a political speech writer who lays bare the mechancs of his trade:

'"I made up three lists: Candidate's Accomplishments (real and imaginary), Accusations Against Opponent (including rumours, allegations, innuendoes, and lies), and Empty Promises (the more improbable the better). Then it was merely a matter of taking various combinations of items from the three lists, throwing in some bombast, tossing in a few local references, and there it was - a brand new speech."'

Mistry also has a very serious point to make about the politics of the era. Even though she is only ever referred to as 'the Prime Minister' it is clear that Indira Gandhi is not to be viewed sympathetically. Beyond the electoral fraud and the abuse of Emergency power we get to see first hand the destructive nature of her policies; whether the 'beautification' of the country which leads to the destruction of the tailor's slum housing or the spectre of sterilisation, used indiscriminately and with force in order to meet quotas and targets. It is Ishvar and Om who bear the brunt of this of course, constantly buffeted from pace to place by those who wield the power above them. Their story is a harrowing one, all the more so for the relentless nature of what they encounter. There is often a moment of calm after they survive one trial, where you allow yourself the indulgence of thinking that maybe that's it, there can't be more for them to endure with their dignified resignation, but there is and I found myself actually vocalising my anguish as I neared the end of the novel.

When talking about the quilt Ishvar says, 'the talent is in joining the pieces'. There is a similar skill in not just assembling a cast of disparate characters for a novel but in making their inter-relationships work, especially with the different ages, castes and cultural backgrounds on show here. In Dina's cramped flat the three men become almost a surrogate family to her, however hard she tries to keep a distance between herself and everything around her. Serving as the background to all this is the city itself, a bustling, chaotic place wonderfully evoked. Any number of its dense population could have been the focus of the narrative as Om is quick to point out to the restaurant owner who is always amazed to hear the latest escapade the tailors have been involved in.

'"It's not us, it's this city", said Om. "A story factory, that's what it is, a spinning mill."'

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