the reverse centaur's guide to life after AI: how to think about artificial intelligence before it's too late (cory doctorow)

Doctorow’s text is a bracing takedown of many of the AI myths, which, he suggests, are promoted in order to increase the share value of the tech firms that are driving the supposed AI revolution. These myths include the idea that AI can drastically reduce the need for a human workforce, as well as the fear that the machines will end up taking over the world. This is all, suggests the writer, a form of froth designed to pump up the value of the tech firms, attracting more and more investment, thereby creating a bubble which will, he contends, have to burst sooner or later. Doctorow is not anti-AI, he has many suggestions as to how it can be a beneficial tool (which is summed up by the perhaps clunky reverse Centaur metaphor), but he is anti the way the quest for AI is manipulating political and economic practice.

 

the adventurist: my life in dangerous places (robert young pelton)

Pelton’s book is in a breezy autobiography. The author has so many stories to tell, it’s impossible to fit them all in, but the book is ultimately anchored, somewhat awkwardly, around his life story. It feels as though the book is an attempt to wrestle with and understand why his restless soul has taken him to so many extreme locations. Is it a result of his dysfunctional parenting? His absurd schooling? Does he belong to a line that goes back to the Victorians like Burton and Baden Powell, with their need to escape the confines of a stunted, conventional society? All these questions run through the book, even if it never really gets to grips with the conflict between his more conventional stable home-life and his quest for danger. The presence of his wife and daughters is a ghostly one. They are, he acknowledges, the other side of a coin which sees him rushing towards the world’s hotspots, knowing he has their love to come home too. In this sense, in spite of the love of adventure, the story is not one of a radical, Rimbaudesque figure. Pelton always seems to have his get-out covered. He is very much a North American hero, albeit Canadian rather than US; safe in the security that this culture bestows, in terms of money, equipment and kudos.  

crack-up capitalism: market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy (quinn slobodian)

Sometimes you read a book and it helps everything click into place. Which is part of the point of reading, to understand the world. Over the past twenty years or so, it has felt as though the political spectrum has been infiltrated and all those things which, as a child of the sixties, were held dear, have been undermined. Free health care; public transport; freedom of speech; that nebulous construct known as democracy, in whose name so many wars have been fought. The very idea of the state has been put into the crosshairs. On the one hand, this might be seen as a reaction to the failure of the Soviet Union and the respective Communist endeavours. On the other hand, the rise of China, which continues to declare itself a communist state puts that narrative in question. So where did these maverick insurgents come from? And how have they managed to shape the world?

Slobodian's book goes a long way to explaining this. Perhaps it is light on the philosophical origins, but it’s revelatory in its description of the intellectual/ political movements of the past forty years. In eleven succinct chapters he traces the dreams, realised and unrealised, of those on the edge of the capitalist spectrum, starting with Milton Friedman’s enthusiasm for Hong Kong and then leading the reader through a maze which includes the usual suspects of Singapore, London and Dubai, but also takes in the unusual suspects of Honduras, Somalia, Lichtenstein. Slobodian shows how the crack-brained schemes of new zones and nations, free of old laws, gradually obtained a foothold in the psyche of the right wing political classes. As a Brit, more than anything the book shows how the radical dreams of the Brexiteers were suckled by the Hayekian visions of previously extremist think tanks. As a neighbour of Argentina, one can trace a clear line to the anarcho-capitalist worldview of Javier Milei.

Crack-Up Capitalism perhaps wisely refrains from taking too subjective a stance on the movements and initiatives it describes. A sly authorial undertone is present, but kept in check, questioning what happens to the workers and the losers in a world without rights or democratic means to alter their conditions. Because the world of crack-up capitalism has a neo-fascist slant: it is a world where the strong flourish and the weak are condemned, where the narco’s wealth has far more value than the working man or woman’s sweat and tears. It is also a world of fantasists. Slobodian makes it clear that a stateless world is an anarcho-fantasy. What this fantasy succeeds in doing, however, is open up the resources of the state like an open cast mine, for those with the engineering capital to plunder at will. The fantasists create the bedrock for the pragmatists to flourish. The result is Brexit Britain, Milei Argentina, Israel… This is how we got to where we are now. 

crash (w&d. cronenberg, w. j.g. ballard)

Crash is a movie which is constructed upon a brilliant premise. About forty minutes in, Elias Koteas’ mysterious and charismatic psychopath introduces a staging of James Dean’s fatal crash, using identical cars, which actually collide. The world of the movie and technology fused in a single moment. The love of speed, which has driven the twentieth century, impaled on the steering wheel of the fixed punctum of the cinema frame. This moment seems to connect Hollywood with Marinetti’s Futurism, with Ducournau’s Titane, the automobile as the death drive of progress. The fact that the characters all want to have sex in cars, all the time, the cars being their potential murderers, only exacerbates the Freudian connotations where sex and death are all part of the same turbulent psychological crisis towards which modernity, and us, its guests, is constantly accelerating.

Having reached this point, 45 minutes into the film, it then feels as though Cronenberg wasn’t entirely sure where to go next. The tension that is laced into the film like a corset in the opening, a place where anything might happens, starts to slip as the characters settle into a playful Schnitzler-esque ronde, seeking to either screw or kill one another in the next car accident they can provoke. The film seems to decelerate rather than accelerate, and the brilliance of the opening forty five minutes becomes a tail light moving out of range, speeding away into a parallel film in another dimension, a dimension Cronenberg’s film would die to crash through to, if only it hadn’t lost the map.

far beyond the pasturelands (d. maude plante-husaruk, maxime lacoste-lebuis)

How much is a mushroom worth? Far Beyond the Pasturelands is an account of how, in the Nepalese highlands of the Himalayas, villagers take time out of their lives to go and search for a particular rare strain of caterpillar mushroom, which are worth five dollars  a pop, and presumably far more when they eventually get to market. The film’s remit remains strictly within the mushroom picking season of the villagers, so how this process fits into the wider matrix of globalisation is never revealed. At the same time, the villagers in their tents are seen watching a Bollywood movie or getting their phones charged as they camp out for the season, miles from their homes and any notion of urban civilisation. They seem to enjoy their foray into the highlands, even if the work is back-breaking and frustrating: it’s possible to go an entire day without finding a single mushroom. The wider context of their lives is only alluded to, although the desire to give their children a better education to escape poverty comes through as a common theme when we hear what the villagers have to say. 

cine, registro vivo de nuestra memoria (film the living record of our memory) (w&d inés toharia)

This is one of those films that if you are a cineaste, you have to watch. There will always be this contradiction about cinema, in that it is an art that is inherently technological, but this is something which works against its longevity. Cinema exists in the dark, in cans or hard drives or clouds or DVDs. It is projected from these spheres of existence onto a screen, but when the projector is switched off, the film has to live on somehow. Toharia’s film opens by explaining how the vast majority of cinema from the silent era is lost forever, victim of recycling for the silver, or fire, because nitrate is highly flammable, or just decay, because film itself is an unstable substance. The film goes on to reveal how the art or science of restoration has evolved, referring to lost classics that have been rediscovered in the most unlikely of places (the lost footage from Metropolis which turned up in Buenos Aires, for example). It also addresses the fact that much of the great cinema of earlier eras is lost forever, and in amongst that is the work of great cineastes whose names we shall never know. The film is wide ranging in its remit, looking at the lost films of Africa, Asia and South America, as well as the more obvious spheres of North America and Europe. Toharia manages to cram a vast amount of information into the film’s two hour running time. The ghost images from lost films which have been partially recovered are inexplicably moving. The film constantly reminds us of the curious magic that is the moving image, a means of cheating time and capturing memory which humankind has never enjoyed before. This is a glorious film which should be seen by anyone with an interest in looking at screens. 

crimes of the future (w&d david cronenberg)

Crimes of the Future feels like a bonne bouche served up by the bastard child of Genet and Foucault. It’s at the same time frothy and intense, revolting and enticing. It’s also a fitting return to body horror, and although it’s likely the director will not have seen Titane before he devised and shot his latest film, there’s a weird feedback loop at work here. Foucault was the first writer I know of to elucidate the concept of the bio-human, and Genet’s writing eroticised the scar. Cronenberg spins the beguiling idea of the potential for the internal organs to evolve in a post-human fashion. This also sets up the conceit of a beauty pageant for the organs, judged on their aesthetic merits. This is a glorious subversion of the idea of the external beauty pageants, or at least if would be if Cronenberg’s casting didn’t seem so reliant on established beauty norms. Every woman in the film more than lives up to contemporary notions of movie star beauty, and we don’t get to see their insides, only those of the hawklike Vigo Mortensen.

As such, the film is perhaps less radical than it might aspire to be, and the absence of a clinical through line also seems to stymie the film’s philosophical growth. Nevertheless, this is a film which is almost inebriated with ideas. The fact it takes place in a futurist Greece only adds to the mix. One of the many strands that evolves is the notion of a post-human which can regurgitate the plastics and other synthetic human products which are polluting and potentially killing the planet. This seems like a great idea, on a cinematic but also a practical level. However, the narrative eventually hinges on the efforts of the vice squad to eliminate these bio-ecologists, for reasons which remain nebulous.

It’s one of those films that is almost overripe for post doctoral analysis. At times brilliant, at times frustratingly slight, as with the throwaway conclusion. Still, the post-humanists are going to be happy. 

happy hour (marlowe granados)

Granados’ chirpy novel, another roman a clef, is the most recent addition to the NY tip I have been of late. It’s set in the mid-teens, and describes the adventures of Isa and Gala, two 21 year old friends who are living the high life on a zero budget, scraping by as they hang out with a kind of second-tier NY jetset. The book recounts one Summer in diary form. It is anecdotal and sub-Fitzgeraldian. In the acknowledgements there is a thanks to “Gay Gatsby for the inspiration, elegance, and cocktails”, and the world depicted is very much a Gatsbyesque demi-monde, which doesn’t appear to have changed that much in the course of a century. It’s a world populated by feckless wealth; selfish people with little generosity. The warmest character in the book is the Salvadorean restaurant owner who appears in the penultimate chapter, encouraging Isa to dance with her husband, who feels like a counterweight to all the book’s vain socialites, many of them the worst kind of posh British.

The book is anecdotal and doesn’t really go anywhere, beyond this scratching of the surface of wealth. All the same, it is an enjoyable read, and reminded me of life in my twenties in London. Cities feed off youth, they need it to reassure them that there is a future beyond the money. Isa and Gala’s splendid ligging brought back memories of desperately trying to scrape pennies together for the night out, and stories of characters who would move from private view to private view in order to eat and drink. Walking home with no money in one’s pockets for the nightbus, constantly walking the high wire of poverty, even as you tiptoe around the city’s circles of disgusting wealth. 

dune (w&d villeneuve, w. jon spaihts, eric roth)

Villeneuve has always shown Wagnerian tendencies and Dune allows him to indulge these to his heart’s content. Sweeping battle formations, caricaturesque villains, titanic scale, finely moulded body armour, sacred swords. All these boxes and many more are ticked. I realise that this is an adaptation of a novel, but the directorial thumbprint is all over it.

A few random thoughts:

Iraq

Villeneuve has turned Dune into an allegory for the US imperial adventures in the Middle East. The references are not subtle, down to the interpolation of the Mahdi myth into the narrative. This world with its palm trees, its shifting sands, its veiled women, feels like it could be one of those slightly abortive Iraq films from a decade ago. Having said this, the message surrounding these signifiers remains confused. Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? Because Chalamet’s princely Paul has a definite gringo feel, but he’s also the heroic epicentre of this narrative. In fact all the heroic characters have a gringo air to them, with Bardem’s maverick rebel commander being the strangely accented exception. Meanwhile, the lead villain is resurrected as a pool of oil. The point of this is that the film offers no clarity on its take on late imperial USA: it just throws a few semiotic signifiers into the mix and lets them stew.

Global Warming

There’s much made in the film about the way in which the Dune planet might have been a paradise but has been turned into a desert hell by the quest for spices (ie oil - the actual process of extracting oil along with the demonic worms seem redolent of fracking). Sous la pavee la plage, or, under the sand, the green. Chalamet and famille live in a verdant, Atlantic land, which they give up in order to pursue the riches inherent in the spice trade. What all this means is anyone’s guess and it there is an eco-parable lurking here, it’s also buried beneath the sands of its Wagnerian hero-worship narrative.

Desert

One of the strongest aspects of Dune is its realisation of the desert, with some remarkable cinematography by Greig Fraser. However, the one thing that I felt on emerging from the air-conditioned Cinemateca into the hottest day of the year, was that the film never succeeded in conveying the claustrophobic, stifling sensation of pure heat, which is fundamental to the idea of the desert and the narrative itself. There’s too much going on for this sensation to ever emerge and seize the audience in its grip. Again this speaks of the use of image and signifier over any real immersion in the film’s professed themes. We can see that we’re in the desert, but it never really feels like a desert, because on the whole this film feels more like walking through a tastefully designed shopping mall full of beautiful customers.

Infantilisation

“I’m all lost in the supermarket”, they sang once upon a time. That song, it seems now, feels like a lament for the way that the commodification of life seeks to strip it of meaning. Dune is a well executed piece of cinema, with some splendid design work and 3D effects. The post production budget must have made the execs’ eyeballs swim with the kind of fear the film never really conveys, for all of Zimmer’s intent to ramp up the tension with his score. However, in the end, what does all this money and glitz actually buy? The reference to Wagner made me think of the finest use of that composer’s music in modern US cinema, in a film that was also about US imperial adventures, but one which actually sought to comment on the reality of the Vietnam war, a gruesome, absurd reality that reflected the dark side of modern USA. Dune just uses these notions as wallpaper to cover the empty cinema wall. Content has been Baudrillarded, it has been stripped of any intent at meaning. We are all children, waiting for the next thrill. Personally I blame George Lucas. 

mindf*ck (christopher wylie)

Chris Wylie is only 31 years old. He’s a kind of Alexander de nos jours. He’s already been a key player in the decline and fall of the United Kingdom, he unwittingly helped to get Trump elected, he helped to militarise the use of data and not content with all that he’s also one of the first to row back and seek to arrest the tumultuous changes he has helped to instigate. It’s truly a Shakespearean journey (Coriolanus comes to mind), albeit one which has only just reached, perhaps, the third act.  Mindf*ck is another of those books that ought to be on the A-Level syllabus. At a time when the teaching of history is under debate in the UK, among other places, the value of a fly-on-the-wall account of some of the century’s key events is invaluable. From my point of view, the portrait of Nix, a kind of grinning Etonian skull, a man with a surfeit of privilege and a deficit of intellect or moral compass, feels particularly telling and indicative of how we (the UK) have got to where we are. Wylie’s observations on post-colonial colonialism are spot-on, reminding us that heritage is a very complex animal. We have entered the Pynchon era when just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you and Wylie’s first person account of the dawning of this age will be a valuable testament in the years and decades to come, if they don’t end up burning it or seeking to scrub it from the data. 

platform capitalism (nick srnicek)

Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism is a pithy breakdown of trends in capitalism, the internet and the shape of the future. There are other books which tackle these subjects in more detail, but Srnicek’s is a straightforward overview which is great for the layman, like myself. It pinpoints the development of internet platforms (the usual suspects) and explains how a website which originally set out to sell books is now selling just about everything and probably taking your temperature at the same time. The book details the varied platforms breaking them down into five groups: Cloud; Advertising; Industrial; Product and Lean, before going on to outline how, as the behemoths of the internet struggle for dominance, these platforms begin to elide and overlap. The book is also very astute in explaining how a surplus of capital with nowhere to go has been allocated to the development of these platforms. The Victorians used surplus capital to build railways and sewers; the 21st century builds ever more complex internet architecture. Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is undoubtably more extensive in its description of the way in which advertising revenue drove the growth of Google and Facebook, but I have to confess it was too detailed for me. Srnicek isn’t trying to write a history of the internet, he’s giving a succinct breakdown of where we are now in a process that is evolving so rapidly, affecting the way in which each and every one of us lives, that the general public inevitably lag behind any capacity to grasp how the earth is moving under our feet. The only point perhaps worth noting is that the book, originally published in 2017, could probably do with an update already, above all in this year where our on-line existence has evolved to compensate for the decline in our off-line access.

ghost town anthology (w&d denis côté)

In Australia, it seemed to me, there was always the great lurking unknown. Something like 95% of the country inhabit a small band of land near the coast. The interior is a pulsing, potentially malevolent, potentially benign god. Roeg’s Walkabout and Weir’s Picnic On Hanging Rock captured this effectively. Canada has a similar wilderness, which is great expanse of the North. Bleak, inhospitable and for the most part unknown. Drive a couple of hours north of Quebec, where this film is set and it does indeed feel as though you’re approaching the edge of the known civilised world. In Cote’s bleak but watchable parable, this has become the land of the dead. They live side by side with the living, only the living don’t notice them. Until, in this instance, a young man dies and comes back to haunt his parents and only brother, precipitating a mass incursion of the dead into the tiny township of Irénée-les-Neiges. There are all kinds of reference points here, from Benjamín Naishtat’s History of Fear, another cold modern dystopian fable set at the opposite end of the Americas, to Miller’s The Crucible. Even, in the use of one memorable image, Chagall. In the corners of the world which are furthest removed from the trappings of the modern world, closest to the wilderness, the forces of magic can still do their thing. 

surrender [joanna pocock]

The tradition of the American west seems to have fallen away somewhat in the 21st C. As I grew up, people were still weaned on images of a wild country, full of men riding horses across dusty plains, women in caravans, native indians on the edge of the horizon. It was still a time when young children were given The Little House on the Prairie to read. The West was that uncharted territory which lay beyond the boundaries of ‘civilisation’, waiting to be explored and, implicitly, ‘tamed’. At university, we studied Willa Cather, along with commentaries on Gatsby, even Jack London. The West as an intellectual space, one which the mind had yet to colonise. That strain of Americanism seems to have dissipated. Silicon Valley, the Hollywood machine, the hipsters of Seattle, have collectively buried the idea that the west contains territory, mental as well as physical, which is a point of conflict with an oriental, European tradition. 

Pocock’s book does a lot to resuscitate this notion. The book feels like a travelogue, as it details the writer’s explorations of alternative cultures from her base in Montana. Pocock, along with her family, is on a kind of pilgrimage, looking to find a way to reconcile her materialist (Londonised) existence with her fears for the world’s future. There is something millenarian about this quest, one which any rational, thinking person cannot help but be aware of. Anyone who belongs to the capitalist materialist system would appear to be complicit in the slow (but quickening) murder of the natural world. Nature and mankind, it seems, have become pitted against each other in a zero sum game, a new hot Cold War. Pocock goes in search of those who are are seeking alternatives. Some are nomadic rewilders who have gone off-grid, others are more settled, searching for a middle ground which will help to gradually bring about the changes required to rebalance the human and natural worlds. Floating around the edges is a more scary, libertarian movement, one which goes around armed and questions the very notion of the state. Pocock weaves her way through these groups, like a modern day Cobbett, detailing her observations and offering up pointers for anyone who’s trying to work out how to keep going in the face of the anthropocene apocalypse. 

What roots the book (which has a certain crossover with Powers’ Overstory) is its resolutely subjective tone. Pocock discusses the death of her parents, her menopause and above all, her relationship with her family who share much of her journey with her. She’s not proselytising; she’s trying to work something out; a city-dweller’s journey into the possibilities of a de-urbanised future. 

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(nb: a memory: The driver tells me that we’re going to visit a nuclear power station. His car is a green 2CV with a roof that flies off at regular intervals. There might be a tape recorder on the seat playing Bo Diddley or Stravinsky. The driver rolls his cigarettes one handed as he steers. We roll through an England which is as green as history suggests it always has been and always should be. We get to the power station late in the afternoon. We’ve driven half a day to get out of the car and stare at a monster. Albeit a beautiful, brutalist monster, framed against a dying sky. I have no real idea why we’re here, or what the reason for this mission might be, but as we gaze at the monster, with the sea behind, everything makes a kind of unintelligible sense.)

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. 

the doll’s alphabet [camilla grudova]

It felt appropriate to be reading Grudova’s strange stories in Mexico, the North American antipode to her native Canada. The skulls, the stitched-up painted faces, the anthropomorphism are all elements her stories and the country have in common. Grudova constructs her gothic universe across the course of the book’s thirteen stories, some brief, some more extended. The book is full of slightly vulnerable female narrators, whose relationships with the opposite sex are rarely straightforward. It’s perhaps a book to be dipped in and out of; sometimes there’s a feeling of repetitiveness as the same tropes reappear. If you like Saunders and Kafka and surrealism, The Doll’s Alphabet will probably delight.

887 (w&d robert lepage)

887 opens in a disarming fashion, with the writer/ director informing that the play will start shortly, but beforehand he just wants to explain his reasons for creating this piece. Which leads us seamlessly into the night’s first piece of theatre magic, as a miniature version of his childhood block of flats in Quebec City appears and he talks us through the various inhabitants. In chocolate box size, little fragments of life from the flats, barely visible, appear in video: a barking dog, or children bouncing on a bed. The style of the play is revealed to be both representational and imagistic at the same time. There is a representation of the narrator’s description, but that representation remains so opaque that it could almost be something abstract, out of an 80s Brook play. The audience is still compelled to become active. It has to work to decipher or interpret the images that are being presented. There’s a ludic quality to the staging, never more so than when Lepage films with his phone the contents of boxes which represent the interior of a flat at Christmas. Tiny details which the naked eye could never see are picked out on a screen, as Lepage’s face hovers beside them. We are made into children once again, exploring the content of the Doll’s House. 

Lepage has always liked to let his work play out over time. In essence, 887 is a memoir of his childhood, gradually revealed with all the urgency of a baggy novel. This memoir incorporates the political history of Quebec, as well as the structure of the brain, and the nature of memory itself. At times, the play rambles, but it rambles in the way a well-told story is allowed to. There are blind alleys and illustrative moments. We, in the audience, know that there will always be magical moments of stagecraft round the corner. This is a picaresque evening, shaped by moments, rather than any great dramatic narrative. Which means that we are blessed with a different fashion of receiving the story. There’s no need for narrative twists or high jinks. Our participation is shaped by enjoyment rather than any kind of dramatic tension. Reminding us that theatre is, above all, spectacle. A point emphasised when Lepage indulges in a brief sequence of shadow play, which, he suggests, might have represented the very origins of theatre.

The play’s denouement, of a kind, is the recital of a poem, Speak White, by the Quebecois author,  Michèle Lalonde. All through the play there has been the running thread that Lepage has been having problems memorising this poem, which he is supposed to recite at a special TV gala. When it comes to the moment, his delivery is faultless and passionate. It’s another kind of spectacle. The poem is a fierce dissertation on the issue of language, and the way in which language is controlled by the powerful. However, it’s also a complex piece of writing. The logic of the poem isn’t easy to follow. In keeping with its content, it rubs up against our notions of ‘coherence’. As though to suggest that “the coherent whole” is a myth, an idea imposed by the powerful on the powerless. Lepage’s play adheres to this thinking. it doesn’t seek to fabricate a work of clarity and complete coherence. It has rough edges, loose strands, it lacks a guaranteed narrative motor. It uses magic rather than argument; it postulates that memory is fragmentary, elusive, incoherent. That these qualities can also be true of theatre. That the notion of the perfect play is ridiculous. That we should learn to watch theatre with the simple delight of children observing the world with eyes anew. His work makes you fall in love with theatre all over again. 

arrival (d. denis villeneuve, w. eric heisserer)

As one of the world’s most ancient cities collapses in on itself in an orgy of cruelty, as human society appears to teeter on the brink, the fantasy of a visit from a wiser, more ‘humane’ civilisation than ours, coming from beyond the stars, is a tempting one. Arrival caters to this fantasy, lending the film a timeliness which goes hand in hand with the hokum. The denouement presents a world which pulls back from the brink of nuclear war and is restored to the harmony of pan-national unity. Egregious wish fulfilment, which looks particularly dangerous coming out of Hollywood in times like these. The film’s efficacy and flair only serves to heighten the contradiction between its message and the actuality of the world within which it is currently being watched. Villeneuve is becoming a master-craftsman, incorporating camera and soundtrack with digital effects to create something which almost allows you to ignore the film’s facile message. The editing, skipping between the character played by Amy Adams’s past and her present, is deftly handled. The set piece scenes, with extra terrestrials which look like something out of Day of the Triffids crossed with ET, are languidly paced and beautifully lit. The film manages to ride the technical challenges which might have revealed the ridiculousness of the premise. It’s all neatly done. Nevertheless, the eternal recurrence thematic feels like soft-soap Nietzsche (all gain no pain) and the notion that a child’s death is to be celebrated might have its place, but tucked into this wish-fulfilment factory piece, at a moment in time when children are being cold-bloodedly murdered, it feels uncomfortable. 

the book of secrets [w. M G Vassanji]

The Book of Secrets, set in Tanzania, spans the best part of the twentieth century. The book of secrets itself appears to be a diary, written by a British colonial officer, Corbin, during his time as the colonial overseer in the backwoods town of Kikono, in the lead up to the first world war. The diary appears to be fairly innocuous, apart from the suggestion of a possible affair with a local woman, Miriamiu, whose husband accuses her of not being a virgin on her wedding night. Miriamiu's son is a pale skinned boy who ends up becoming wealthy and traveling to England. The book suggests that the colonial official and his possible son met and might possibly have possibly broached the subject of paternity, or might not have done.

Vassanji's narrator is Pius Fernandes, a schoolteacher in Dar Es Salaam, who is given the diary, which has survived through the century, and who takes on responsiblity for investigating its origins. This narrator recounts the various stories of the people who may or may not have been connected to the diary. These are a varied bunch, from Corbin to the son, Ali, to the woman Ali later runs off to England with, to the English poet who makes Dar Es Salaam his home. The narrative meanders across the years, and has a knack of engaging the reader in a particular character only to let that character's storyline drift out of the narrative as it moves on to the next. As a result, it feels as though the reader is continually restarting the project of the book and the quest for the true significance of the Book of Secrets. This particular reader never really got to the bottom of the diary's significance - it felt like something of a Maguffin around which Vassanji could embroider his knowledge of Tanzania, past and present, and the diverse communities that inhabited the country. 

The diary and Pius's mission to discover its secrets insinuates both the idea of a dramatic resolution to the book as well as some kind of key to the recent history of Tanzania. As it becomes clear that the book will not deliver on its insinuation, the reader has two courses of action. One is to become a little frustrated with a literal pretentiousness (understanding that word to mean an undelivered pretension to communicate something which is, in the end, never communicated); and secondly to enjoy the ramblingly assembled portrait of a faintly idyllic part of the world.  

eastern promises (dir. cronenberg)

The film opens with a scene of dramatic violence. A barber tries to convince his son to cut his customer's throat. The son doesn't want to. The barber does it. The director shows the blood emanating from the great tear in the throat. The victim convulses and the audience flinches.

Cronenberg opens his movie with a scene of high drama. By the end, the drama has been extinguished. A child plays with its adopted family. A man sits in the restaurant he now controls. Their stories are far from over, but the film is moving on, and the credits roll.

This contrast between the implied dramatic weight of the film and the actual dramatic weight is curious. It could be interpreted as the director running out of steam, editing together a short cut ending because he wasn't sure how to finish it. However, the pace and the tone feel in keeping with the rest of the film, so it may be something else.

Increasingly, Cronenberg's films come to feel like fables. He has lost interest, if he ever had it, in the mechanics of plot. He creates characters who have a timlessness, belonging to timeless societies. The villains who arrive at the beginning of History of Violence could be from any stage of US history. They arrive like something out of a Western. The Russians from Eastern Promises belong to a secret criminal society that has a mythical, preternatural aura.

Cronenberg doesn't seem interested in the details of the drug smuggling the criminals are involved with. The revelation that Mortensen's character, Nikolai, is an undercover cop, seems incidental. He doesn't even seem interested in the brewing love affair between Mortensen and the fragrant Naomi Watts. What seems to fascinate him nowadays is the notion of how close the forces of anti-sociality, the secret codes of violence, are to our own society. How they are closer than we think, and when they arrive, they have no connection with the world as we see it, and their destructive power is incalculable.

Eastern Promises consciously pulls its punches. The audience knows this because we know how hard it can punch. The scenes of violence establish this - the throat cutting and the bath-house bloodbath. But just as we're anticipating the mother of all finales - it doesn't happen. The child survives and Naomi Watts sits in the garden wearing a pretty dress. Nickolai's takeover of his wing of the Russian mafia is painless, his mentor, Semyon, simply vanishes. It's like the Godfather with the ruthlessness implied but not demonstrated.

Cronenberg's movies no longer have the snap, crackle and pop of his earlier frightners. They are meditative works, where the violence has become a part of the scenery, rather than a means to a dramatic end. London is a grey, damp world in his movie, a land of no promise, and the forces of darkness are lurking, just around the corner.