a dirty war (anna politkovskaya)

The journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered in 2006. Reading this book of her articles written for Novaya Gazeta about the second Chechen war, and knowing what we know about Putin’s Russia, the fact of her murder, no matter how shocking, no longer seems surprising. In much the same way as being a journalist in Mexico is a perilous profession, being a journalist prepared to go after the truth in Putin’s Russia is a job with a low life expectancy. Politkovskaya details the events of the war with a sanguine tone, describing its barbarous cruelties with her weather-beaten prose. The world had little interest in the suffering of the Chechens, and Politkovskaya seems all too aware of this. The absurdities of the Russian military campaign, one which appeared to benefit no-one and nothing save for consolidating Putin’s grasp on power, are repeatedly flagged up. One of the many grotesque chapters deals with the military office in charge of documenting the fatalities of Russian soldiers, charged with finding a way of delivering information no-one wants to hear. One can imagine his relief at finding someone willing to listen to him.

Of course, these past months we have all been compelled to finally take our heads out of the sand and pay some attention to the horrors that Politkovskaya detailed and warned about over twenty years ago. She was the Cassandra that no-one wanted to hear. Why did no-one care about Chechnya and Grozny’s fate? Perhaps because it was a Muslim country, perhaps because it was that little bit further away than Ukraine, perhaps because it was deeply inconvenient for vested interests who depended so much on the largesse of Russian wealth. Read Politkovskaya’s book and weep, not just for Ukraine, but for all the other people who have been victims of an aggression which seems to be almost nihilistic. Politkovskaya herself being another of these victims, an irony which she would no doubt have reported with the deadpan humanity which marks out as one of the bravest journalists of the twenty first century.  

arcadia (nicolson)

Nicholson is a restless writer, constantly seeking windmills to tilt his theories against. Arcadia takes the premise that the ancient English estates which were formed at the end of the Middle Ages and consolidated in Tudor times offered a vision of indentured Englishness which was collective, bucolic and aspirational, in spite of the fact these estates were autocratic and had little respect for individual freedoms. HIs wider theory is that within a social framework, the citizen has to accept compromises about the degree of liberty as opposed to the degree of security, whereas contemporary UK is a society that has chosen to value liberty above any great sense of security.

Nicholson’s focus is the Wiltshire estates of the Pembroke family, where Phillip Sidney wrote his great poem, Arcadia, (dedicated to his sister the Countess of Pembroke), and which inspired a sleepy, idyllic vision in the work of Aubrey, Browne and others. This was a nostalgic vision, one  with one foot in an idealised past and another in an inevitably compromised present. The book traces the way that the very power of these estates lead to the conflict with the king that produced the Civil War, but suggests that underneath this conflict was a more ideological struggle between a communal vision of Britain and an individualistic vision. HIs slightly heretical conclusion is that people had a better standard of living with less freedom than with more. When one thinks of the harsh rural world depicted by Hardy, where the labouring rural class had few rights and less security, a world which was in Nicholson’s view a direct result of the defeat of the more paternalistic, autocratic Tudor society, the logic of his argument is clear. There is even an ecological element to Nicholson’s argument, as the Tudor estates permitted smallholdings, whereas the subsequent break up of the copyholder system lead to the construction of vast farms owned by the few, driven by the need for profit as much as a requirement for sustainability. Nicholson’s writing tends to flourish when it is more comprehensively tied to the articulation of his theory and the latter half of the book tends to get lost in the detail of history. All the same this is a book that speaks of Britain past and Britain present with a degree of imaginative and intellectual verve which puts those phoney fogeys of the current government to shame.

“It was an organic ideal, a belief not in mutual exploitation but in the balance of different parts of society. To some extent, ever since, these have been the values of the counter-culture, an underlying thread of idealism which has run throughout the history of the modern world.”

desierto. (charles bowden)

“He is old enough to pre-date the modern border. Until about 1930 it was a line on a map, not on the earth, and Don Pedro remembers cattle drives from the valley up to Tubac in Arizona. The same kind of border the Yaquis knew and crossed in their endless comings and goings for refuge and guns and bullets. For these people at some level it is all a piece of ground and the ground is absolutely connected.”

Bowden’s book is an account of a land that transcends the border humans have imposed on it. This land is the territory that exists between the hills of Sinaloa, the wastelands of Texas and the coastal reaches of Southern California. Within this territory live Mexicans, North Americans, and the indigenous people whose forefathers predated the arrival of either. It is also the home to coyotes and lions. It is a territory whose modern economy is dominated by the exploitation of the desert and the narcotics industry. Bowden’s book, reporting back from the front line in the nineties, is the godfather to Cormac McCarthy and the stepson of Edward Abbey, whose influence he acknowledges in the opening pages. Thereafter it’s a ride of remarkable brilliance through the highways and byways of the territory. Bowden hangs out with the Sari fishermen, the Sinaloa narcos, and the gringo entrepreneurs who get swallowed by the savings and loans scandal that prefigured the crash of 2008. All of this against the backdrop of the desert, that immutable space which contextualises all human actions and puts them in its cruel shade. Bowden possessed the unusual capacity for a gringo, firstly of having curiosity for the Mexican and native cultures, and secondly of being able to gain their trust sufficiently to write about these worlds with the authority of a quasi insider. His voice, little known, is that of a poet-journalist who understood a land which can never be understood within the conventions of human power, no matter how much that power seeks to scar its landscape.

Nb. I remember in Michoacán when the elder of the community, Don Esteban, told us how when he was younger he would head to the US and there was no demarcated border. For generations the border wasn’t even an idea. Then it became an idea, but nothing more. Now it is a frontline. However, the land and nature, Bowden suggests, know no border and his remarkable book offers a glimpse of this alternative geography.

europa (w&d haider rashid, w. sonia giannetto, erfan rashid)

I was the only person in the cinema at the ICA to see Europa, a tale of an Iraqi immigrant crossing the border into Bulgaria. The disinterest in the film seemed unsurprising, although I am sure that were this to have been a film about an immigrant from somewhere whose conflict is more widely covered in the news, there might have been a larger audience. Attitudes towards immigration are inherently racist, and the recent traumatic events on Europe’s border have sadly made this even more clear, if it was ever in doubt. In the style of Son of Saul, the camera keeps close to Kamal’s face as he tries to stay alive in the forest, eluding vigilantes and desperately seeking out food and water. There is one remarkable scene where he manages to flag down a lift from a middle aged woman, who is increasingly scared of him, and finally screams at him to get out. The ambiguous conclusion is equally powerful. Europa is an indictment of Western Europe’s callous immigration policies, told in a high energy style. Kamal is a person, not a number on a spreadsheet, whose elemental quest to stay alive, rather than being alleviated, becomes even more nightmarish once he crosses into the fabled fortress of Europa. 

paris 13th arrondissement (les olympiades) (w&d audiard, w. nicolas livecchi, léa mysius, céline sciamma)

It’s been a while since I’ve been fortunate enough to watch an Audiard movie. Paris 13th, (which has a much better title in French), showcases all his verve and style with the expected aplomb as it tells its multi-racial story of what we take to be the new France, or at least the new Paris. Three characters come together in a chirpy love triangle, with both Émilie and Nora sleeping with the charismatic but feckless Camille. The action is resolutely set in the 13th Arrondissement. I tried to think where might be an equivalent in London, and couldn’t come up with one, as even the margins in London are becoming gentrified. A decade ago it might have been Peckham, where I am now, but these days you can’t buy a house for less than half a million in Peckham, so I have no idea. It’s almost as though the city has eaten the poorer suburbs, and one wonders if this might not also be the case in Paris. Audiard studiously avoids any shots with the Eiffel Tower or any other prominent landmark in Paris 13, keen to assert that this is a film about Paris really lives, rather than how it is mythologised. Perhaps more surprisingly, there’s no overt racism either. The second generation immigrants are fully assimilated Parisians now, the multi-cultural society flourishes in a way that the last great Paris banlieu film, La Haine, suggested might never happen. La Haine hangs heavy over Paris 13, which is filmed in an assertive black and white. La Haine in turn smouldered in the wake of the films of the nouveau vague, Paris Nous Appartient, A Bout de Souffle, etcetera. It’s as though all these films have set out to own Paris, to marry their vision of that cultural beast, French cinema, with its most celebrated icon, the city of Paris itself. Audiard presents an ultimately optimistic view of a diverse, sexually liberated society which is still underpinned by the conservative notion of romantic love. Perhaps this is why there remains something slightly unconvincing about the movie. The sex is too well filmed, the characters are too pretty, the surface never feels as though it’s really ruffled. There are too many loose threads and convenient solutions in the script. (Camille just happens to find himself running an estate agents, and when one thinks about the realities of estate agents in this era of housing inflation, the set-up feels scarcely credible.) The notional naturalism, fundamental to a narrative that is so ostentatiously set in a particular barrio, doesn’t quite hold up. (The philosophical sex worker is another unconvincing trope.) Ultimately the film feels too feelgood, too much of an excuse to put pretty bodies through the motions, before they will become middle aged and flaccid and disillusioned. The optimism of Paris 13 might charm, but as a depiction of a capital city in Europe in the 2020s, it feels more Rohmer than Godard, and given the stakes that Audiard flirts with (race, sex, gender, immigration) it doesn’t entirely convince.

berta isla (marias, tr jull costa)

The eponymous heroine of Berta Isla is an archetype for the kind of heroine that shouldn’t work. Berta does nothing except wait. Her husband, Tomas, is an agent for the British secret services. Where he goes and what he does remains a mystery, both to Berta and the reader. He might be in Northern Ireland, he might be in Buenos Aires. We and she will never know. Marias’ novel riffs off the work of Le Carré and Fleming, but where their writing takes us inside the workings of the secret service, Marias leaves us, like his heroine, firmly on the outside. She is Penelope, and the author stitches together her patient story with a minimal colour palette. This is also a novel about the beginning and the end, with very little in the middle, the middle being dedicated to the art of patience.

All of which makes for a curious, deliberately frustrating novel, which seems to undercut the demand for narrative and action. The plot points are staked at the beginning and ending, the suspense comes from not knowing, the jeopardy is ever-present but kept at arm’s length. In this sense, the novel subtly adopts the position of the reader. Few readers will be engaged, as Tomas is, in the defence of the realm. This is the luxury of peace, of modern European life. The dramatic action of our lives is tepid. Movies and literature seek to spice up this bland existence with tales of unlikely heroism, which have little to do with the realities of the cold war fought by those like Tomas. We sit at home, patiently awaiting our little drama of mortality, as we watch Netflix and contemplate which colour car to choose in order to destroy the planet.

Perhaps there is a cold fury lurking somewhere in Berta Isla, but it is so deeply buried that it can only emerge in the occasional news reports Berta catches of a murder in Belfast or the sinking of a ship in the South Atlantic. These currents, the book declares, course back and forth beneath the fabric of our lives, enabling us to circumvent tragedy. The price we pay for this, which is also our reward, is a kind of atomised, civilised banality.

And we should remember, as we flirt with other realities, the value of this banality.

“Why is there bread in the baker’s shops and cakes in the cake shops, why do the street lamps turn on and turn off, why does the stock market go up and down and everyone receive his or her high or low salary at the end of the month? This seems perfectly normal to us and yet it’s really quite extraordinary, it’s amazing that each day begins and ends.”