strandings: confessions of a whale scavenger (peter riley)

What do you do when you’ve been obsessed with whales all your life, to such an extent that you’ve become an expert on Moby Dick? Of course, you write a book about it, non-fiction, trying to make sense of your psychological deviance and looking for a way to incorporate this into the history of a country which has engaged on a course of deviant psychological damage. A country which has become a beached whale, just as you are a beached whale, just as a beached whale is a beached whale. It’s a somewhat tenuous theory, but Riley milks it for all it’s worth and the book includes revelatory moments. Above all in the way it traces the evolution of a beached whale society, the scavengers and fetishists who feel the pull of the whales, just as the whales themselves feel the pull of the tides which erroneously cause them to commit an auto-de-fe by choosing land over water. These characters represent an alternative Britain, none more so than the mythical ‘Big Blue’ to whom a truly wondrous chapter is dedicated, a character so Dickensian he feels he really ought to be fictional. These oddballs, some using the whale as a metaphor for the possibilities of Brexit, as opposed to the author’s use of the metaphor as the catastrophe of Brexit, construct a fascinating map of the island’s coastal regions, the point of elision between the values of the nation state and the values of the deep. At times it feels as though Riley slightly overplays his hand as he seeks to impose his map of the whale territory on the map of the country, but this is nevertheless a book that conjures out of its unlikely thesis an engaging, off-centre read. 

fire in babylon (d stevan riley)

The Summer of 1976 was hot. I was ten years old. My family lived in Northwood. I lived there for the three months when I wasn't at boarding school. There was a large garden with a small wooded area at the back. An ample lawn, with flowerbeds on either side. At the bottom of the garden, in front of the house, there was a rosebed. The garden sloped downwards. At certain points in our lives, times when there was a lot of rain, my father would dig channels across the lawn. I presume this was to channel the rainwater away from running down towards the house, but I can't be sure. The sitting room had French windows which opened out onto the garden.

I spent a lot of that Summer playing cricket. I imagine I played mostly with my friend Nick and my oldest sister. The ball would get lost in the flowerbed on a regular basis. The great fear was that it would be hit down the garden and break a window, something which happened at least once. Days were long and hot. In between bouts of playing cricket, we'd go inside and watch it on the television. The old men of England were being terrorised by the West Indians. This is a key part of the film, Fire in Babylon, which tells the story of the rise of the West Indian cricket team in the seventies. The film accentuates to a certain extent the racial overtones of the cricketing conflict between the West Indians and an English team lead by a South African. However, from a child's perspective the issue of race was non-existent. The only thing that was clear was that the West Indians had fiercer bowlers who were too much for the likes of Close and Edrich, men who looked like the most boring of school teachers.

The film made me think about what a peculiar but enrichening slant a following of cricket generates in a youngster. Cricket is a global game, albeit one played by only about ten countries at the highest levels. India, Pakistan, the West Indies: as a youngster I never saw these places in terms of race; merely in terms of cricketing prowess. It's interesting to note that several of the cricketers who feature in this film have expressed reservations about the way in which their comments have been used: the issue of race might have been bubbling under but it was not the priority the film suggests.

All the same, Fire In Babylon looks like belonging to a series of films which seek to elevate sport, placing it within its socio-political context. (The soon to be released Senna will be another). Given the enormous industry that modern sport has become, this seems like both a canny and a justifiable approach. Sport can play a part in the collective consciousness in a way in which art can only look on in jealousy. Art can reclaim its role by seeking to contextualise those moments or feats which are extolled in the day only to be forgotten. Apparently when several of the current West Indian team saw the film, (a team that has reverted to being "calypso cricketers", a tag which Clive Lloyd's team hoped to leave behind forever), they had no idea of the full history of the West Indian team.

Sport is part of the lives of so many of us. On one level it's just commercialised froth; on another its part of the warp and woof of the world we inhabit.