warlight [michael ondaatje]

To write a highly abridged version of the cultural history of the Second World War: First there were the tales of heroism. The Dambusters, Henry V, lots of Kenneth More. Perhaps even Casablanca, at a more twisted edge.  My generation (the sixties) grew up with these stories, rendered in black and white, as distant as the eighties must be to a child born a decade ago. Although literature already adopted a more nuanced take: The Plague, Brideshead: a war whose complexity writers struggled to pin down. Next, perhaps the backlash. The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare, the war as a backdrop for villainy, complexity. Marathon Man, Shoah, Au Revoir Les Enfants, Another Time Another Place: the truth that there was more to this war than tales of heroism. It was a dirty complex affair. Gravity’s Rainbow and Slaughterhouse Five. Primo Levi, Rawicz and the other holocaust writers. Then, perhaps, the decades of disinterest. War movies were about Vietnam; literature was grappling with post-colonialism, post-existentialism. When it returned, the Second World War had become a post-historical playground. A space for US directors to play out their fantasies. (Spielberg’s Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan; Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards.) It was just another theatre to display special effects and sanitised or desanitised variations on the hero myth. The audience was no longer likely to have lived or experienced the war; the memory ties having been cut, the narrative could be adopted to fit any kind of thesis. Films like Scorsese’s Shutter Island adopted it as a backdrop. Even Son of Saul, for all its potency, is as much an exercise in filmmaking chutzpah as it is a historical discourse. When all, including the worst, is known, there will be nothing more to reveal: it will be about how the work of art chooses to portray the narrative, the techniques, the “art”.

Which takes us to the UK. As previously noted, there has been a glut of recent interest in the arts related to the Second World War. Much has been made of the possible connections between a re-vindication of Britain as an independent nation and the spate of films about D-Day and Churchill. In literature, McEwan’s Atonement, (also made into a film which was celebrated above all for the quality of a tracking shot), signalled the employment of the war as a form of dissecting values which have extended and become distorted in the decades that followed. As though the Second World War is starting to replace the First (which replaced the imperial wars which replaced the Napoleonic wars etc) as a definitive starting point for the understanding of contemporary Britain. (For my generation, the first world war, dulce et decorum est and the poets, still marked that starting point.) All of which leads us up to Ondaatje’s novel, set both during and in the aftermath of a war which, the book suggests, didn’t end in 1945, but dragged on into an unforeseeable future. 

Warlight tells the story of Nathaniel, AKA Stitch, whose mother was a spy in the war and the post-war, where she was involved in the partisan struggles in Italy and the Balkans. Nathaniel’s upbringing lacks any kind of familial warmth, with both of his parents absent on secret service duty. Instead, he and his sister are adopted by a surrogate family of oddballs and petty criminals. Nathaniel learns to fit in and feel as though he belongs to this classless society. He has stints working in the Criterion restaurant in Piccadilly, as well as assisting the smuggler, ‘The Dart’, move his wares around the London canal system. This world, however, is abruptly taken away as his mother’s past (and present) catches up with him and his sister. A second family is ruptured. Nathaniel spends the rest of the book as a low-key Sherlock, (one of his surrogate family has him read Doyle when he’s young), trying to solve the mystery of his mother’s life, and his own fate. 

The writing is, at times dazzling. The author succeeds in bringing this post-war Britain to life with precision and elegance. The book is stacked with detail, from the barrows where people go to eat and exchange gossip in the still bombed-out London streets to the details of the nature of the Suffolk coast. And perhaps there remains the odd reveal, such as the corps of meteorologists who flew in hang-gliders, studying the air currents and weather patterns as the generals prepared for D-Day. Above all, the book’s narrative, and Nathaniel’s emotional history, hinges on the post-war actions of the British, as the Second World War seamlessly elided into the Cold War. Nathaniel pays an emotional price for this over-elaboration, the way in which the power-games of war created a platform for military-political meddling at Europe’s fringes, and elsewhere. Likewise the new, classless British society, represented by The Dart and The Moth and Nathaniel’s teenage fling with the working-class waitress, Agnes, is brought down by the secret machine of war.

It’s tempting to view Ondaatje’s vision, which sometimes veers towards the nostalgic-bucolic, as a critique of the breakdown of the post-war values which lead to the Welfare State, one of the war’s great victories, the product of a kinder society, one which chooses to protect, even sacrifice itself for the good of Nathaniel and his sister. This world fades as, Nathaniel, who appears to have no affective life of his own, drifts towards isolation and nostalgia, desperately seeking to recover a maternal/ paternal affection he was deprived of. The coldness of the British, the novel seems to say, has its roots in pretensions of empire. 

Whether this reading is valid or not, or just a reflection of the reader’s perspective, is impossible to say. However, what is without doubt is that Warlight is a novel constructed with a conjurer’s sleight of hand, whose elastic structure allows the writer to flit between post-war and pre-war Britain, telling a complex family history from multiple angles. There are least four beautifully realised worlds contained within the novel: post-war London; pre and post-war Suffolk; and post-war Italy. The writing is elegiac without ever giving into sentimentalism. It honours the valour of the war, whilst acknowledging the cost, a cost which British society, perhaps, continues to pay. 

à bout de souffle (d godard, w truffaut)

Who would have thought I had never actually seen Breathless in its entirety? Clips galore, a million posters or stills on bedroom walls, Belmondo and Seberg, as iconic as Bogart and Bergman, Godard’s vainglorious ambition realised. Perhaps even more so, as Bogart gradually fades into the cinematic palaeolithic age. Who has stepped into the breach to follow Seberg and Belmondo? Or has romantic cool been killed off, once and for all? Answers on a postcard.

My friend, Jason, had stills from À Bout de Souffle on his study wall. (We had individual studies where I went to school, that was how it was.) If Godard understood one thing that Anglo-Saxon filmmakers didn’t, until then, it was the seductive power of the image, cinema’s secret weapon, a weapon whose potency can still elevate cinema above and beyond the Dickensian nouvel vague of the boxset series. The irony being that once they cottoned on, every Anglo-Saxon film school, and film school student, began to follow in Godard’s footsteps, so that the image has now acquired, within the arcane corners of subsidised cinema, the breeding ground for the mainstream, an almost religious devotion. As a result delivering films which are a collection of moments, like misshaped pearls strung together on a string, each one struggling for transcendence, rarely coming together to form a collective whole.

Or perhaps Tarkovsky is to blame. Still, the experience of watching a film that one has imagined already watched, but one hasn’t actually seen, is disconcerting. Every moment a predictable surprise. What I didn’t expect, perhaps, was the amorality of Belmondo’s anti-hero. He’s an unreconstructed bastard and he’s proud of it. Populist existentialism. This is one aspect of Hazanavicius’ film, Redoubtable, which feels spot-on, as the commoners approach his Godard and ask when he’s going to start making entertaining movies again, like À Bout De Souffle. The film exudes a rip-it-up delight, which goes hand-in-hand with the slapstick violence sequences, as though cast and crew are giving two fingers to the values of their elders. (Not without justification, given what the French were up to in Algeria etc). This is proto-punk, guitar-smashing par excellence. Albeit carried off with a breathless Parisian charm.

beyond a boundary [c.l.r james]

James makes a rather beautiful observation regarding not just cricket, but sport in general; that this is for many an aesthetic experience, on a par with watching, for example, theatre or ballet. His own prose, above all as he describes the forgotten cricketing heroes of his boyhood Trinidad, makes the point forcefully. Watching these players expanded his understanding of the possible, the potential that is latent in the human form. Cricket is perhaps all the more remarkable for being a sport that is not contingent so much on physical strength or power. On the cricket field there’s room for all sorts. It’s a game where even today, players can continue to operate at the highest levels into their late thirties, even their forties. The spindly veteran spinner can outthink the dashing young batsman. 

The book is at its best when looking backwards to the past. His account of the way in which the local cricket matches binded his Trinidadian community together, youngsters and elders, men and women, is beguiling. It helps to explain why cricket, with its extended, day-long playing times, so often mocked, is in fact a great celebratory communal event. James is also, unsurprisingly, very good on the way in which cricket helped to form a Trinidadian identity, as well as a West Indian identity. In this regard it seems a pity that the book ends before the period of West Indian dominance which marked my own youth. Doubtless he would have had a few contrarian things to have said, alongside the plaudits. 

However, perhaps the strongest section of the book is the one where James discusses the origins of the professional game in England. Earlier in the book he has described his passion for English literature, formed through this colonial schooling. His thesis on the way in which sport, particularly cricket, is as important as anything else in the construction of Victorian society is beautifully outlined in the chapters on Grace and the evolution of the game in the nineteenth century. Born in 1901, it feels as though James has spoken with those from previous generations who lived through this remarkable period. In a few brief chapters he manages to convey as much about the transformation of Victorian society towards something still recognisable today as many an extended novel. Not least because his own upbringing permitted him to see the cohesive power of sport, something which even now occupies little space in intellectual discourse, despite the fact that organised sport has become, across the whole world, a dominant cultural practice. 

deception [phillip roth]

“Betrayal is an overwhelming charge, don’t you think? There was no contract drawn up stating that in matters pertaining to you I would forswear my profession. I am a thief and a thief is not to be trusted.” “Not even by his moll?” “However visible you may be feeling, you weren’t identified in that book or made overly identifiable. However much you may have served as a model, the great British public happens to be ignorant of it and you only have to not tell them for them to remain ignorant.” 

Cursory background reading leads one to discover that this novel was written when Roth spent time living in London, where he was married to the actress, Claire Bloom, best known to my generation for her role in Brideshead Revisited, a TV series which helped to set a nostalgic vision of what Britain might have been, whose shadow still seems to hang over the country. Whilst in London, Roth slotted into its literary circles, hanging out with, among others, Hare and Pinter. Deception includes one section where the narrator, a Jewish US writer, tells of how he has to suffer at dinner parties as British intellectuals chastise him for both US and Israeli foreign policy, and it’s not hard to imagine Roth and Pinter battling it out over the port in some grandiose Notting Hill dining salon. Deception would also appear to be written in the shadow of Pinter’s masterpiece, Betrayal. Both Pinter’s play and Roth’s novel are constructed around the notion of affairs in literary London. Curiously, Deception is also written for the most part in dialogue, so that it reads like a play, with the occasional stage direction thrown in.

The two works differ in ways that are far more than political. Roth seems to rebel against what he perceives as a British instinct towards hypocrisy and niceties, whereas Pinter’s text positively glories in the joys of hypocrisy. Roth’s narrator doesn’t want any truck with guilt or hang-ups. He’s having an affair and he doesn’t care who knows. Having said which, there’s a telling final section towards the end where the narrator’s wife finds his notebooks, which are, effectively the novel we have just read, and the novelist defends his honour, saying that the affair(s) postulated in the notebooks are purely fictional, they’re an exercise of the imagination. Which is then undercut by a subsequent brief passage where the narrator, having returned to New York, is contacted by his former lover. On the one hand, the author is indulging in metaphysical game-playing; on the other he seems to want to pull the rug from under the reader’s feet, and say, ‘in fact it was all true’. Or could this even be a dig at Pinter, who used his affair with Bakewell to create the content of his play, whilst never acknowledging, at least in public, the existence of the affair. 

Which perhaps takes us to the nub and the issue with Deception, the novel: who the fuck cares about these well paid literary types hanging out in their Notting Hill parlours, finding a room for illicit sex in the afternoons, and then bickering with their wives; or sitting around the dinner table putting the world to rights. It’s a precious, navel-gazing world which only feathers the reader’s emotional or intellectual engagement. It may be a roman a clef, but unlike Betrayal, a play which somehow reaches for the essence of what it means to be in love and/or married, Deception feels strangely passionless. If you renounce the value of romantic love, its hypocrisy and its foolishness, there’s nothing at stake. Although Roth’s narrator says many times that he was in love with his mistress, it ends up feeling as though, as the narrator himself observes in a discussion with his wife, he was only ever in love with the idea of his mistress. When things break apart, there’s no sense of loss. Pinter’s text takes us to the heart of an issue: the way in which we define our notion of self through the act of sleeping with another; Roth’s text seems to suggest that in fact this act of sleeping with another is nothing more than a moveable feast, a dangerous liaison to while away those rainy London afternoons. 

theatre of war / teatro de guerra (d. lola arias)

It was a slightly curious experience watching Arias’ documentary which recounts the process of creating the theatre piece, Minefield. Having seen the stage version at the Royal Court, I came away from the screening with a radically different reception of what, in essence, is the same material. Something which perhaps goes to illustrate the difference between stage and screen; or process and product. Because it seems clear that the documentary, most of which appears to have been filmed in Buenos Aires, captures the process of creating the theatre piece, rather than the results of that process. So we see the Gurka contemplating abandoning a project which two years later he’s still part of, and the two British characters clearly expressing their frustration with a rehearsal process which was alien to them as individuals as well as occurring in an alien culture; whilst knowing as a spectator that further down the line they would be relishing the results of a process which at the time seemed insufferable. (Welcome to the world of theatre rehearsals.) 

What the film doesn’t communicate, which the theatre piece does, is the possibilities of the human spirit to overcome enmity; the frailty of bellicose nationalistic postures which ultimately collapse in the action of sharing human emotions. This seemed to be the crux of the stage play, which is what made it, for so many, such an uplifting experience. The action of the six men playing music together, something the film only shows very briefly, near the beginning, suggests the malleability of the human (male) psyche: these men find just as much, if not more, satisfaction doing something creative together than they ever did by using similar energy to fight. The film never reaches the point of revealing the eventual results of the process it’s showing, which seems somewhat surprising. Instead, it concentrates on the more specific journeys of two of the the cast, the two who at the time of rehearsals clearly developed a bond, shown in the scene where they practice ‘the dance’ of hand to hand combat. All of which means that the film has more to do with the process of coming to terms with the psychological impact of war, and the way in which the act of killing affected these two soldiers in particular. 

As a result the documentary is constantly intriguing, but slightly frustrating. It never quite coalesces. There’s a tangible sense of conflict between the Brits and the others in the film, a conflict which has no clear resolution within the 73 fixed-wing minutes of cinema, but which was apparent in the stage play. Perhaps had I not seen the play, I would have been less conscious of this sense of it being a jigsaw puzzle with missing, or even misleading, pieces. 

super-cannes [j g ballard]

Despite not having read much Ballard, his transgressive British literary voice is so pervasive that it’s hard not to feel as though you know his work intimately. In part, one imagines, his success is down to the fact that, whilst transgressive, he’s also a consummate (and structurally conservative) storyteller. The narrative of Super-Cannes rattles along at a steady pace, even if it never really feels as though it’s close to hitting top gear. As a result, the concept behind the novel feels far more dangerous than the novel itself. 

This concept is beguiling; an exploration of a summarily twenty-first century world where corporate entities possess their own space, which they police themselves, a post-political space where you can invent your own morality. Super-Cannes is a large industrial/ residential park, near Cannes, where high-level execs get to do their thing. Which mostly involves working, but whose resident shrink has devised a novel way of letting off steam: organised petty crime. High-end execs don’t do squash or affairs; they go out into the streets and participate in some minor league brown shirt action, beating up immigrants, stealing valuables or sleeping with child prostitutes. Which in a Trumpian world doesn’t sound all that far-fetched. The narrator, a level-headed English pilot, Paul Sinclair, married to one of the site’s new doctors, gradually pieces together the truth of what is happening, before deciding to take radical action to bring down this neo-fascist enclave. The level-headed Englishman is one of the few prophetic notes that jars, but in so many other ways Ballard seems to be putting his finger on the brutal new realities of a world run by corporations. 

Having said which, the novel itself, which is framed as a detective story, with Sinclair investigating why his wife’s predecessor went on an insane shooting spree, feels somewhat prosaic. The twists and turns really do sometimes feel as though they’re going round in circles. The writer’s research is worn on the sleeve, and one imagines Ballard hanging out on the Cote D’Azur for months, suffering terribly as he made notes for his latest masterpiece. There’s something of a conjurer’s trick about it all: a story which claims to rent asunder the shroud of contemporary society, dressed up in the bows and ribbons of a highly consumable literary approach. 

nosotros las piedras (we the stones) (d. álvaro torres crespo)

Crespo’s doc is a relatively brief, immersive journey into the lives of gold-panners living a destitute life in the jungles of Costa Rica. Exiled out of the national park where they formerly looked for gold, they get by on tiny fragments of gold dust. The quantities they manage to extract from the rivers are minimal. The panners, as a result, live a life of abejct poverty, clinging to a dream which seems completely illusory - a kind of fool’s gold. The narrative and visual style are determinably poetic, even whimsical. Over the course of a little less than an hour we glide through these marginalised people’s lives, the camera spying on them. There were times when it felt as though the film might have excavated these lives in more detail; all the same the film serves the purpose of classic documentary, taking the viewer into a world we will never know, revealing the harshness and cudged fortitude of people who exist beyond the mainframe of modernity.