Blame the dramatist David Hare for raising this. Speaking a few days ago about a thriller series he has just completed, he warned against our coming to it with the wrong expectations. There’ll be no guns, he promised, adding that ‘I personally can’t stand the body count in contemporary drama. I think it’s ridiculous.’ Amen to that. I don’t agree with David Hare about everything. I am less interested in exposing the wrongs of MI5 than he is, for example. But that’s a temperamental thing. I can live with more secrecy than he can. The thought of government agents working in the shadows makes me feel safe – as long, of course, as it’s our government they’re working for. About the body count, though, we are as one.
I haven’t done much killing myself. By about my third novel I was wondering whether I was even going to allow anyone to die by natural causes. Characters make their own fates, but you can always subtly intervene. If not by miracle cure then by silence, for silence, too, is an intervention and the novelist can decide to look the other way when his characters fall ill.
The first time one of mine gave up the ghost I sank into a depression that lasted half a year. ‘Cheer up,’ people told me. ‘It may never happen.’ But it already had. I’d assisted at a deathbed scene. I’d been a party – no matter how unwilling – to the gravest of all human events. There’s no cheering up after that. It’s hard enough just to rejoin the living.
I did once ask a distinguished crime writer how she – funny how often it’s a she – coped with all the bodies. She laughed. ‘Oh, you just knock ’em off,’ she said.
How you do that without feeling you’re in some way an accessory is what I can’t fathom. Nor do I understand how you can litter the page or the stage with corpses if you’re not yourself familiar a) with the sight of them, b) with the psychology of those that turned them into corpses, and c) with murder’s aftermath of remorse and sorrow. I don’t say a writer needs to have fired a gun herself, but to kill in art is a crime in itself if the deed and its repercussions are not felt to outrage and perplex our humanity.
If that sounds as though I’m asking every writer who assists at a murder to be possessed of a little of the Shakespeare who wrote Macbeth, then yes, that is exactly what I’m asking. It’s not that difficult to hear Macbeth if you write in English. Our language is permeated with Shakespeare and with Macbeth especially. Dr Johnson cited it more often in his dictionary than any other Shakespeare play, and alongside the Old and New Testaments it remains central to the way we imagine the act of taking life and the price we pay for doing so.
‘If the assassination could trammel up the consequence,’ Macbeth ponders – the strangled expression mimicking the strangled hope – ‘we’d jump the life to come.’ If. If only. ‘But’ – the fatal but – ‘in these cases we still have judgement here.’
What makes Macbeth the most interesting murderer in literature is the ground he imaginatively covers, the dimension of pity and damnation he enters, even before he lifts a hand. If tears don’t drown the wind for an assassin, you have to wonder why. Is this one too lacking in ethical and spiritual foresight to feel the enormity of the act? Is that one too motivated by hate? It’s a drama of the profoundest significance either way.
After the initial fun of watching bodies pile up in a Tarantino movie, or being fed into wood chippers in Fargo, the being blasé starts to pall. Grand Guignol degenerates into pantomime. I enjoy the spectacle of Mr Punch laying into everyone around him, but he inhabits a universe in which assassination trammels up consequence only because it’s comic.
It’s not the number of bodies that makes the contemporary thriller ridiculous. It’s the corresponding lack of poetic seriousness. And that’s more than a passing failure of expression. To kill in art and not give a damn is a failure of mind and senses. For an antidote, go to a literary festival and hear Alice Oswald reciting Memorial, her version of Homer’s Iliad, in which the victims of the Trojan War – a body count to stop the heart – are commemorated in all their disgrace and majesty.
The first to die was PROTESILAUS.
… He died in mid-air jumping to be first ashore
There was his house half-built
His wife rushed out clawing her face.
And HECTOR died like everyone else …
a spear found out the little patch of white
Between his collarbone and his throat
Just exactly where a man’s soul sits
Waiting for the mouth to open.
Did I say go and hear her? Let me put that another way. Kill to hear her.
In praise of insincerity
The assumption of Jeremy Corbyn oughtn’t to surprise. Not because the man himself has long been a flower in the Stop the War, Whoever Is Our Enemy Is Our Friend, And Never Mind Who That Means We Rub Shoulders With, daisy-chain-plaiting wing of the Labour Party, but because we couldn’t go on forever pretending that the coexistence of the soup kitchen and the banker’s bonus was just another of life’s unavoidable little cruelties. Once in a while we need the hard left to pipe up.
You don’t have to believe the electorate secretly hankers for a dose of Marxist–Leninism to accept that there are deep levels of justified bitterness out there waiting to be tapped. How Ed Miliband and his team of hopefuls managed not to tap them is a question still engrossing the Labour Party, but the idea that its socialism was to blame never was convincing, if only because it didn’t look or sound socialist. Maybe we’d forgotten what socialists are meant to look and sound like. Well, now we’ve been reminded. They’re meant to look and sound like Jeremy Corbyn. I can’t pretend to know what draws anyone to a politician, never having been drawn to one myself, but it would seem that nostalgia has a lot to do with it in this instance. A rough beast we thought extinct has come slouching back out of the undergrowth.
As for those who are too young to remember him the first time round, they are astounded by the novelty of a politician who resembles a British Rail booking clerk moonlighting as a polytechnic sociologist, except that they won’t remember what British Rail or a polytechnic was. Such an alliance, between those with faded memories of CND and funded trips to the Soviet Union, and those with no memories of anything, is proving formidable. It offers to efface, at a stroke, the occasionally shoddy pragmatism we’ve grown accustomed to. The campfires burn; our souls are clean; we clap along and anything feels possible.
I’m not against it. I like a singalong. And I’m a bit of a sentimentalist for the past myself. Just before the trains were handed over to Richard Branson they were almost running on time and selling sandwiches designed by Clement Freud and wines selected by Fay Weldon. Now they won’t tell you what platform any train is leaving from until it’s left and the food might have been prepared by Primark. So I’m with Corbyn on taking back the railways, no matter that he hasn’t yet named the novelist he’d like to see selecting the wine. And I’m with him on energy companies as well. Why shouldn’t the state make a profit out of heating my Jacuzzi? On protecting public libraries, too, I agree. Ditto not making the poor pay higher taxes than the rich. Ditto not burning the unemployed at stakes. If this makes me a socialist, then I’m a socialist. But here’s a question: why can’t we oppose the inequities of a society weighted in favour of wealth, and all the trash that wealth accumulates, without at the same time having to snuggle up to Putin, pal out with Hamas, and make apologies for extremists?
The sad collapse of Kids Company highlights the plight of neglected children; it’s a national disgrace that without such charities there is no one to pick up the pieces. We should be able to admit that and keep Trident. And bomb ISIS in Syria. And look back on the IRA’s terror campaign with something less than misty-eyed affection.
Truth isn’t a carpet not a single thread of which dare be removed without the entire tapestry unravelling. In fact, the more individually brilliant the threads, the more exquisite the carpet. But the Corbyn catechism is predicated on the presence of a divine unsmiling artificer at the loom, weaving his single truth over a
nd over again. The oppressor’s wrong, weave weave, the wickedness of the West, weave weave, imperialism, weave weave, and our own responsibility, weave weave, for every act of violence directed against us. The Great Banality Carpet woven on the Great Loom of the Single Thought.
Socialism has learned from religion to keep all promises of salvation simple – no one ever yet lit a candle for nuance – and not to underestimate the allure of masochism. The faithful feel holiest when blaming themselves, except the young, who feel holiest when blaming the old. For all the wicked, colonialist things our parents did, O Lord – including the Balfour Declaration, whatever that was – we say sorry.
Corbyn’s distinction is to have held on to these articles of faith while all about him have been losing theirs. In an age of facing both ways, he doggedly faces in one direction only. That this makes him authentic I have no desire to question. But our weariness with the vacillations of insincere politicians is no reason to put our trust in the rigidities of a sincere one. History teaches that the road to horror is paved with sincere schemes for mankind’s amelioration.
We are fools for sincerity. ‘The poetry of a teenager in love,’ writes the Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate, ‘is sincere: that is what makes it bad. The key to dramatic art is Insincerity.’ The dramatist, he goes on, should only pretend to feel what he expresses; that way he can pretend to feel the opposite just as well. Politicians aren’t writers. But we should value in a politician no less than in a writer the ability to feel variously, admit ambiguity, understand the equal attraction of opposing truths, and to know when to mistrust ‘truth’ altogether. The case against Tony Blair is sometimes that he believed nothing, and sometimes that he believed too much. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Iraq war, it was God, he said, who whispered to him to go in. What if he was sincere in this? Do you, who abhor that war, applaud his sincerity? Or would you rather he’d been more calculating?
One thing that war does teach: the rightness of a course of action cannot be decided by the authenticity of its advocates. We should think twice before we let sincerity be our lodestone.
The ghost speech
Four years ago, in these pages, I described the experience of winning the Man Booker Prize. But since a man must take the rough with the smooth, it now behoves me to describe the experience of not winning it. So here’s my description. Not as good.
To be frank, I’d been expecting nothing else. It makes existential sense to me to assume failure. Count on misfortune and what’s the worst that can happen? Once in a blue moon you’ll be pleasantly surprised, that’s all. It was in such spirits, anticipating disappointment, that I made my way to the Guildhall for this week’s prize and so wasn’t disappointed when disappointment struck.
Reader, I had read the runes. Checked the alignment of the planets. Noted the sorrowing way strangers had begun to look at me in the street. You never know for certain when you are going to win a prize, but you know for certain when you aren’t. One sure sign, for me, is the appearance, the night before any awards ceremony, of a well-known literary figure who comes up behind me on whatever corner of the blasted heath of writerly hope I happen to be wandering – outside the London Library or at the bar of the Groucho Club – enfolds me violently in what I have to come to think of as the Hug of Death, and walks off.
Not a word is spoken. Not a murmur of sympathy or condolence. Just an anonymous philanthropic embrace calculated to squeeze out any last remnant of delusive expectation. How he knows what decision the judges will reach before they’ve reached it I have no idea. But he has never been wrong yet. If he doesn’t appear, I win. If it’s the Hug of Death, I lose. And this year he hugged me harder than he’d ever hugged me before.
I had no choice, for all that, but to write what’s known in the business as the Ghost Speech. The Ghost Speech is the speech you don’t expect to deliver but keep buried deep in your dinner-jacket pocket just in case. No matter how certain you are of losing, you daren’t risk being wrong this one time and having to go to the microphone unprepared.
As acts of self-torture go, writing an acceptance speech for a prize you know you’re not going to win is only marginally less masochistic than writing it before you’re even on the longlist. But novelists are dreamers and fantasists, imagining the unimaginable and looking forward to what can never be. ‘The mind dances,’ Dr Johnson says of those who delight too much in silent speculation, ‘from scene to scene, unites all pleasures in all combinations, and riots in delights which Nature and fortune, with all their bounty, cannot bestow.’ Condemned to which pitiable folly, writers carry around innumerable acceptance speeches in their heads for prizes that do not yet exist, and for which their work would be unlikely to be considered even if they did.
I made a modest essay at a Ghost Speech this time round, a precautionary few words, no more. In it I told the true story of an encounter with a shirt salesman the day before. I had taken my dinner shirt from the hanger on which it had returned from the dry-cleaner only to discover bloodstains down the front. Had someone at the dry-cleaner’s killed himself while pressing my shirt? Had he – a friend of one of the other shortlisted novelists, perhaps – known to whom the shirt belonged and imagined he was stabbing me in the heart? Or had the shirt, in a macabre act of Poe-like ominousness, bled of its own accord in my wardrobe? Whatever the explanation, I had to run quickly to Bond Street to buy a new one. Without once raising his eyes to me while wrapping it, the shop assistant said, ‘Is this for tomorrow night’s Man Booker Prize dinner?’
I concealed all astonishment at his conversance with the prize – Bond Street’s Bond Street after all – and told him yes. Still without raising his eyes, he wished me well, saying that from what he’d read he gathered I had a good chance. (Was this Satan, the Great Enticer, speaking in a shirt salesman’s guise?) I told him I had already won once and that there needed to be an overwhelming argument for a writer to receive so great an honour twice. Finally, he looked up. ‘Surely the only overwhelming argument, sir,’ he said, ‘is a good read.’
A phrase I abominate. We don’t call Mozart’s Requiem ‘a good listen’, or a Rembrandt self-portrait ‘a good watch’. ‘In my view,’ I told the salesman, ‘read’s best used as a verb. It sits ill as a noun. It detracts from the active, dialectical nature of the reading experience. Literature, like the life it interprets and illuminates, is a knot intrinsicate, sitting on a high hill of truth, and he that would unpick it about must and about must go …’
Whereupon he left me to serve another customer.
At this point in my Ghost Speech I would fix the distinguished guests with a Moses-like stare and say, ‘But you all – lovers of the rich, the subtle and the complex – you know what I mean.’
An unnecessary admonition. Judges of the Man Booker Prize no longer speak of preferring novels that ‘skip along’. But the phrase ‘a good read’, along with its bastard brother ‘an easy read’, still crops up in even the most serious newspapers and journals, and cannot be outed as an idiocy too often.
In the event, the winner Richard Flanagan put it better and with more magnanimity. This too tempered my disappointment. Reader, I like him. An Australian novelist who calls me ‘mate’ and doesn’t talk about ‘good reads’ – how can I not like him? The others, too. Ali, Karen, Neel, Josh – my new family. How six shortlisted novelists could grow fond of one another under the pressure of such intense competition I cannot explain. But we did. Was it the last huddle of literary love before cultural extinction? Or just happy circumstance? Either way I had a good time. Only by winning could I have had a better.
Yes but no but
I’ve a proposal to make: what if, instead of employing the Chomsky ‘but’ whenever something terrible is visited on us, we tried saying ‘and’ instead? Not just for the fun of it but to make the world a better, bigger, more inclusive space. ‘But’ shrinks and grudges; ‘and’ amplifies and allows.
Let me remind you how the Chomsky ‘but’ operates. ‘The attac
k on the Twin Towers was an atrocity,’ you concede, ‘ “but”…’ And here you insert whichever qualifier takes your fancy. ‘The attack on the Twin Towers was an atrocity, “but” Americans are committing atrocities all the time.’ ‘The attack on the Twin Towers was an atrocity, “but” George Bush is a shit.’ Or, how about, ‘Gunning down the staff of Charlie Hebdo was an atrocity, “but” Israel kills journalists in Gaza.’ Would anyone say that? Unless I dreamed it, Noam Chomsky just has.
So now change his ‘but’ to ‘and’ and see what happens. Take your time.
Salman Rushdie, meanwhile, has been doing sterling work on American television and in the American press fingering the ‘butters’. The ‘But Brigade’, he felicitously calls them. As someone who has been a victim of ideologically organised ‘butting’ himself, he knows whereof he speaks. ‘No, we cannot tolerate fatwas on writers, “but” he did insult the Prophet, and you wouldn’t like it if he’d insulted Jesus or Moses.’ Which is disingenuous, since most of us wouldn’t mind at all.
Chomsky himself has ‘butted’ vociferously over the years about the fatwa imposed on Rushdie, noting that Western intellectuals were up in arms in favour of Rushdie ‘but’ had nothing to say when it came to the imprisoning of Holocaust deniers. A selective truth, since many Western intellectuals have opposed the imprisoning of Holocaust deniers, believing it to be a more effective punishment to leave them wandering round what’s left of Auschwitz and Buchenwald with their rulers and log tables for all eternity. Besides which, the fate of a Holocaust denier touches us less deeply than that of a novelist threatened with assassination, if for no other reason than that a novelist adds to the world’s stock of knowledge, while a Holocaust denier detracts from it. All life is precious, but we mourn less when a skunk dies than when a tiger does.
The Dog's Last Walk Page 24