January 2016 book and film review

BOOKS

FINNEGANS WAKE by  James Joyce
A morally questionable Dublin innkeeper falls asleep dead drunk and in the course of one very strange night dreams a dream of all humanity. Or does he?
What did I feel about reading Joyce's epic journey into the human condition? I would say it was the most confusannoymystificahilariousbook I've ever read. Andthensome.
Problems with The Wake  begin straight away. Note that "Finnegans" contains no apostrophe, even if some commentators might persist in putting one in. Leaving it out opens up other possibilities, like "Finn Again Wakes" or "Finnegans (plural) Wake". Once into the text the problems, or delights, begin on page 1. We can try to see it as a narrative, and many books written since have tried to tease out some sort of "plot", though others say this is missing the point of the book, whatever that is, entirely.
Let us, by way of illustration, look at the opening of chapter I.V (page 104):

In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!

Your first thought has to be, say wha? Yet if you read it out loud there is a kind of dancing rhythm to the words. We may also notice that "unhemmed as it is uneven" is perhaps an echo of that part of the Lord's Prayer which states "...On Earth as it is in Heaven..." And the more perceptive among us might also notice a reference to a sura from the Koran which goes: "...In the name of Allah, the all Merciful, the Compassionate..."
And if we consult Duncan McHugh's Annotations to Finnegans Wake, which, page for page, offers a limited insight into the seemingly impenetrable text, he reminds us there is a reference in here to "Anna Livia Plurabelle", wife of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker,  the hero/antihero of the book, and who represents in a way, not only womankind as a whole but also the spirit of all rivers everywhere. "Haloed be her eve" might refer to Halloween, whereas "unhemmed" may refer to the Danish word hemme, which means to check, or hamper. Joyce called on no less than 47 languages in creating the text, and drew from the cultural stock of civilisations from every continent and every era. No wonder it took him 17 years to write...

So it may not be as confusing as you thought. Or is it? What does it all mean? Nobody claims to understand the book completely, not even such luminaries as Samuel Beckett or Anthony Burgess, two of England's cleverest men, who have spent years studying it. Yet the undeniable truth is The Wake is fun to read, with its invented words (100 to every page) and wickedly funny puns which are salted throughout the text. Stop worrying about what it all means, I found myself saying: just dive in and let the words flow through you, plunging into a strange, fast flowing river of wondrouswords.
I'm glad I did.

THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Being ten long short stories from the casebook of  history's greatest detective. With its silvery clarity and logical train of thought these tales provided a suitable antidote to the Byzantine complexities of The Wake, and I salted them into my reading of that book, partly as a way of maintaining my sanity. I bought on Kindle the complete works of Dr Watson, for the princely sum of £1, and will dip into them from time to time, leaving out only the 2 or 3 books I have already read. Watching Sherlock Holmes is a perennially popular occupation, as interpreters from Robert Downey Jr to Benedict Cumberbatch can testify, though how popular the books are now I'm not sure, though the price the entire oeuvre commands suggests perhaps not much. I have a Chinese friend who read them all as a way of improving her English, and she continues to read and re-read them to her infinite pleasure. At home, however, I wonder if they are not now seen as all a bit passe.
Pity.

FILMS

JOHN WICK (2014) D- Chad Stahelski and David Leitch (uncredited). A former hitman refuses to sell his 1969 Ford Mustang to a Russian mobster, who in a fit of pique beats him up and shoots his puppy. Bad move. John Wick isn't just a hitman, he's the killingest sonofabitch in the whole valley, capable, as we learn early on, of killing three men in a bar using only a pencil. And when he goes after the mobsters he's armed with a lot more than that. There may be films with a larger body-count, but there can't be any where one man is responsible for so much bloodletting.

We've come across super-killers before; Denzel Washington in The Equalizer, Viggo Mortensen in A History of violence, but nothing comes close to the now somewhat grizzled Keanu Reeves in this movie. But here the problem is engagement. We could identify with "Joey" in A History of Violence, and "McCall" in The Equalizer, but here the killings are piled on so thick and fast we hardly have time to catch our breath. There is also a question of tone. Is it ironic, is it trying to look like Sin City, are they trying to play it for laughs? And why did it need two directors, one of whom is uncredited? Maybe that's the problem...

DEADLIER THAN THE MALE (1967) D- Ralph Thomas. Two beautiful, bikini clad women (Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina) emerge from the sea and chat with a man on the shore, then impale him with a couple of harpoons. They then wander off, discussing makeup and hair. Turns out they're part of an evil empire of assassination and high crime, led by an evil billionaire (Nigel Green). But they have not reckoned on Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond (Richard Johnson) being brought in to take them on.
In the late 60s, trading on the unprecedented success of the Bond movies, there came a slew of pastiches, parodies and general rip-offs. There were the four "Matt Helm" movies starring Dean Martin, The Liquidator, Our Man Flint and In Like Flint and many, many others, from around the world. But this British offering, notable for its level of violence, worse still perpetrated by women, was too much for the BBFC, who awarded it an "X" certificate. And my youthful looks at the time made it  impossible for me to see it when it came out. Annoying!

In every Bond film there is an elaborate set piece at the end to provide an awe-inspiring climax, and this film has its own: a chess game between hero and villain played on a giant board with giant motorized pieces. A cursory glance, however, reveals that the pieces could not perform a knight's move, which kind of makes the whole thing a bit stoopid. No matter, the whole is satisfying, not only for the sultriness of its two leads but for its unashamed tonguincheekness.

PEGGY GUGGENHEIM: ART ADDICT (2015) D- Lisa Imordino Vreeland. Towards the end of her life in the late 1970s, Peggy Guggenheim, art collector extraordinaire, finally submitted herself to an in depth interview about her long and fascinating life.
"Most of the people I knew are dead now, so it probably doesn't matter if I tell everything."
And so she did. Born into the billionaire family in 1898, though party only to a tiny fraction of their vast fortune (the poor thing only had $450,000 in 1919, barely enough to keep body and soul together), she found herself intrigued by the avant garde artists of the day and began collecting their paintings. Many of these works would end up being worth hundreds or even thousands of times what she paid for them, but it was never the money that interested Peggy, but the art, and particularly the men who created it..

Not being possessed of natural physical beauty, she nonetheless had a kind of earthy sexiness which was clearly attractive. It is said she slept with most of the painters she bought art from, and married several of them, notably the surrealist Max Ernst, who it has to be said did not treat her very well. Meanwhile her art collection grew and she developed a rep as one of the savviest collectors around. Then in 1949 she bought a small palace in Venice in which to live and house her collection, later opening it to the public. I have visited it and it is one of the best museum experiences in the world. One can sense her ghost wandering the pathways in its magnificent gardens, or walking through the exhibition rooms, perhaps straightening a picture here and there and recalling the tristes she enjoyed with the artist. The film conjures all this magic with great skill and subtlety, but its core lies in the interview mentioned above, with all its honesty and no-nonsense candour.
A fine piece of work.

CINDERELLA (2015) D- Kenneth Branagh. Beautiful, downtrodden girl snags the best looking, not to say richest guy in town then loses track of him. All comes right in the end of course, thanks to a bit of timely magic.
Being the latest in a series of adaptations of Charles Perrault's fairy story, this time having an awful lot of  the Disney corporation money thrown at it and deploying some of the biggest names around: Lily James as Cinders, Cate Blanchett as the evil step mother and HBC as fairy godmother. With a talented guy like Branagh in charge, this project could not fail. It didn't. Made in Britain- isn't almost everything these days? the film has made over half a billion dollars after an outlay of less than $100 million, so people around the world clearly loved it. I'm not saying I didn't, I just felt it was a bit too obvious that it is in part based on the 1950 Disney animation version, so not exactly stepping outside the box there.  But Disney didn't want Branagh to step outside the box, and he's good at taking notes.

BLACK BOOK (2007) D- Paul Verhoeven. At the height of WW2 in occupied Holland, a Wehrmacht officer is making a very tidy living duping Jews into participating in an escape plan, then murdering them and stealing all their valuables, while pocketing all the loot for himself. A group of resistance fighters are determined to off him, and in order to do so one of them, gorgeous Carice van Houten (you'll know her as Melisandre the Red Witch in Game of Thrones) decides to work for the Nazis  to get close to her quarry. A dangerous game in more ways than one. First, she'll be beheaded if the Nazis  break her cover, and second, even if successful she risks being killed by the Dutch as a collaborator once the war is over.

Paul Verhoeven went to Hollywood in the 1980s and soon carved out a reputation as someone who could put a big budget, high action movie together on time and make a lot of money for the producers. In doing so he made some of the key movies of that era: Robocop, Total Recall and of course the much reviled but highly successful Basic Instinct. For this movie he returned to his native Netherlands and produced a film which became the most popular film ever in that country. And it is good, thrilling, very sexy (Carice has to seduce a German officer at one point and deploys skills which would corrupt St Francis of Assisi) and, like all his movies, superbly paced.

MAMMA MIA! (2008) D- Phyllidia Lloyd. A lady of a certain age runs a bar on a Greek island, where she is joined by her daughter who is about to be married. Thing is, she'd like her Dad to give her away, but her Dad could be one of three possible candidates. So unknown to her Mum, she invites all three of them to the celebrations, in the hope that the truth of her parentage will somehow emerge. Hilarious chaos ensues, all set to the music of a quite successful Swedish combo.

Let me say straight away this is not my sort of movie, though I would appear to be in the minority. Mamma Mia! went down a storm on the stage before it ever got to the screen, where its success was more or less a shoe-in. Big stars were brought in (Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan etc etc) and a high professional standard throughout made it look good on the screen despite its lighter-than-air substance. It also illustrated the modern trend for having stars sing even if they quite patently can't (I refer to Pierce, who must have been very puzzled when he got through the auditions), a phenomenon which found its truest expression in Les Mis which makes a virtue out of being a musical peopled largely by actors who can't hold a tune. This is in stark contrast to a previous era when nearly all the major players in West Side Story had their singing voices overdubbed. Even Rita Moreno, a professional singer, had to fight hard to avoid having her voice dubbed. That was done in secret, with the actual singers never being credited. The questionable ethics of that sort of practice have passed into history, and rightly so. I'm not saying we should return to that, but I think I am saying that if you're going to make a musical, you should at least cast people who can sing. That's not too outrageous is it?

LORD JIM (1965) D-Richard Brooks. At the turn of the 20th century, a dashing young Englishman (Peter O'Toole) disgraces himself by abandoning a burning ship and leaving the passengers to their fates. He spends the rest of his life trying to atone for this act, and when he is offered the chance of helping a group of rebels in the Far East bring down their tyrannical rulers he jumps at the chance, even though the chances of his own survival are slim...

That is essentially your movie in a nutshell and with a highly competent director at the helm, treating one of Joseph Conrad's most interesting novels, and everybody's favourite Irishman in the lead, you'd have thought this was a classic in the making. Strange then, that it wasn't. O'Toole seems self conscious in his role, although he later said he was wounded by criticism of his contribution and regarded it as one of his best roles. The direction comes over as wooden, and time seems to drag terribly- it's at least half an hour too long. It was chosen as the Royal Command Performance film for 1965, so the poor Queen had to sit through the whole thing, showing how demanding the role of royalty can be sometimes...

Paying your bills on time makes sense- unless you're Tesco

Back in the late medieval era, when I was senior partner of a busy general practice, we employed a new practice manager and one day she came to me saying:
 "There are some bills to pay. Shall I leave them until I get final demands?
I replied:
 "No, let's pay them now."
She seemed puzzled, one reason why she didn't last long with us. I like my bills to be paid promptly (don't you?  Doesn't everyone?) and the other side of that coin is to pay your own bills on time. A rule which doesn't appear to mean much to the senior managers at Tesco, who for years delayed paying for as long as possible, sometimes bringing their creditors to the verge of bankruptcy. Their tardiness, according to a report published yesterday, amounted to hundreds of millions of pounds, and was a deliberate policy. Unfortunately there is no way of punishing their immoral behaviour, so essentially they have got away with it, and a simple "sorry" will close out the story. My verdict: a disgrace.

A QUESTION OF NEUTRALITY

Apparently Israel's premier Netenyahu was up in arms yesterday over the UN's Secretary General slamming Israel's persisting in building settlements in the occupied territories on the West Bank.
 "The UN should remain  neutral!" he bleated. But for me the UN should NOT remain neutral when it sees an obvious injustice being perpetrated by a powerful nation over a weaker one. It didn't remain neutral, for instance, over the issue of apartheid in South Africa, after the dawn of the 1980s at least. Of course, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan did  adopt a neutral attitude, on the grounds of furthering trade, to their everlasting shame.
What if the UN was extant during WWII, and it condemned the holocaust. Would the Nazis have complained bitterly about its lack of neutrality then? Of course the UN didn't exist at the time, though the Catholic church did, and of course as we now know they knew what was going on, and remained tight lipped, to their everlasting shame.
What the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians has been likened to apartheid by no lesser figure than Desmond Tutu. There is no neutral position on apartheid, or the holocaust, or the subjugation of the Palestinian people. They're all morally wrong, and we should all speak out whenever we see a moral crime going on under our noses.

One time, two times, three times a lady

Doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?
When was the last time you heard someone use the word "thrice"? The answer, I suspect, is never. The word is now confined to novels of the 19th century. Nobody ever uses the word in conversation today, and as my wife observed in her dealings with her students, the word "twice" is going the same way. All the young folk now say "two times", and I was wondering when the same thing is going to happen to "once".
The English language is evolving in real time as it has always done, and it's no good old farts like me complaining- it's as much use as trying to hold back the tide.

A dear friend of mine gets very exercised when he hears the word "unique" misused; indeed, he gets so worked up about it steam comes screaming from his ears whenever he does. The word stands alone, he argues, meaning the "only one" and cannot therefore be qualified by words like "very", "totally" etc. It's like "top". You can't be very top, or quite top, just top. But he's trying to hold back the tide too. The word unique now no longer means unique, but only "very unusual", at least in everyday speech, and he's going to have to get used to it if he is not to have a cardy over it. Other examples include the word "dice" for a single die (who ever says that any more?) and the confusion between the terms "less" and "fewer". It won't be long before the words are interchangeable, whatever Fowler's Modern English Usage might have to say about it.

So let's go with the flow, rather than face a losing battle against the march of history. Language has always been about communication, and that is the real point here. TTFN!

It's official: it's 1/99

Back in the 60s a group of socialist actors, led by the playwright John McGrath, gave itself the name "The Seven Eighty Four Theatre Company". The name was based on the way wealth was apportioned in Britain at the time, ie 7% of the population owned 84% of the wealth. I happened to run into John McGrath in the early 80s and he told me the figure was then more like 4/91.

Today OXFAM announced that, world wide, that figure is now 1/99. Even more amazingly, just 62 individuals control more wealth than the poorest 3.5 billion people on Earth. These individuals, mainly Russians, Arabs, Chinese and Americans (and a smattering from elsewhere) are the real world leaders. They control what happens in the world, while the rest of us lick the crumbs from their tables. For example, the mighty Port Talbot steel works, once the biggest in Europe, has had to lay off 700 of its workforce because of the massive dumping of steel  by the Chinese, at knock-down prices, on the markets, meaning it is now almost impossible to turn a profit in the steel making industry. My first thought about that, considering the price of other "hards" as they call metals in the stock market, have also plummeted, perhaps now they'll stop stealing copper wiring, pealing the lead off church roofs and melting down much loved sculptures from parks.

Over the weekend Jeremy Corbyn suggested companies should be prevented from paying dividends to their shareholders until they pay all their workers at least the living wage. Naturally it was   attacked as a piece of naked communism by the Daily Mail et al, but actually it seems eminently sensible to, well, anyone currently languishing on the lower minimum wage. Those shareholders aren't going to give up a percentage point or two of their unearned profits without a fight. So be it.

A few years ago someone put forward the idea of a "Robin Hood" tax  of 0.7% on all transactions in the City. As trillions of pounds wash through the Square Mile every day, even this tiny percentage would generate billions, hopefully to be used to alleviate world poverty and generally make it a more equitable place to live in. Of course the idea was trashed and has little chance of coming about in my lifetime. Meanwhile, the 62 "super-oligarchs" go on getting richer, at your expense and mine, and all we can do is watch. Capitalism works, for them and the 1%. For the rest of the world, it sucks.

RIP Saint David

There has been a tremendous outpouring of grief today at the passing of David Bowie. One friend likened his influence to that of Andy Warhol, though in my view Bowie's impact on world culture has been even greater. "Why didn't they knight him?" my friend asked. Why indeed. Paul McCartney, Tom Jones, Elton John, Mick Jagger. If they were in a room right now they would all have to agree that Bowie's achievements are as great, or even greater, than any of them. My friend continued: "I mean, they even gave one to Lenny Henry!"

When the news hit me this morning, my birthday, it was a like a physical blow. I have been reeling all day and even as I write I am still feeling numb. Much will be written about Bowie in the next few days, so I shall suffice with my own Bowie story.

It was 1979, and I had just watched the TV premier of Ashes to Ashes on TOTP. The impact was seismic. We all knew Major Tom from 11 years ago, but had nearly forgotten him in the maelstrom of Bowie's career in the intervening period. Now here he was again, still up, out there, far above the moon. And now,
 Ashes, to ashes, fun to funky
We know major Tom's a junkie
And that video, the strange colour effects, Steve Strange doing his very strange thing. It was all too much. I ran out of the house to a dear friend's flat nearby and hit the bell. She opened the door in a flash.
"Did you see it?" I asked
"Oh my God yes!" she replied, and we grabbed each other and held on for a long time. There are few moments like that in the history of pop music. And so fitting it should be David Bowie who created it.

New drinking guidelines: we're all screwed

Most of us, anyway. Me definitely. Although I drink barely 20 units a week, I have not hitherto established an AFD, or alcohol free day ( I am about to instate one: Sunday), but I'm still over the limit. Jeez! Apparently men and women are now restricted to a mere 14 units per week, with three AFDs recommended.

Naturally this is a bit of a head-fuck for me, who, when I was a practising GP used to recommend a much more generous allowance. What happened to the traditional belief that moderate drinking actually conferred a longer life expectancy than being teetotal? Now it seems the only group this applies to is women over 55, and even they should drink no more than 5 units per week in order to gain the benefit.

I think a little common sense needs to be inserted into this argument. Let us examine the advice that has been offered about the use of aspirin as a "primary preventive" against the risk of heart attack and stroke. The term "primary preventive" refers to people who have no particular risk factors flagged up already, like an actual history of those events. Advice on this subject given to GPs for them to pass on to their patients has changed no less than six times in the last 40 years. FYI, the very latest advice is that the risk of catastrophic haemorrhage does outweigh its benefits, but watch this space. That advice could change tomorrow.

Where does that leave us vis a vis alcohol? Will these latest guidelines be subject to review as more research comes in? I wouldn't be surprised. To me this new advice is unnecessarily draconian. Yes, excessive alcohol intake is associated with an increased cancer risk, although as we all know, the other problems that alcoholism causes, not just to the drinker but to their families and society as a whole is far more significant. But is moderate alcohol intake that injurious to our health? I just can't accept it. Not yet.

Obama: a voice crying in the wilderness

President Obama is now officially a "lame duck president", having barely a year left to serve in office. This is often a fallow period for US presidents, but Obama has departed from the usual protocol and taken the gun issue to his heart in a way never seen before. In a very moving speech yesterday, he reminded Americans, and the world, that there are 30,000 gun related deaths every year in their nation, and that no other "advanced" country suffers anything like this level of homicidal violence.

As an ex-lawyer he obviously has extensive knowledge of the Constitution and its various amendments. He pointed out that the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, but not the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, in order to protect the innocent; also that privacy is protected, but no one minds going through a metal detector at an airport, for precisely the same reason.

But when he proposes to increase background checks prior to purchasing a gun, to protect the innocent, a very minor step really, suddenly the gun lobby starts shouting about encroachment on freedom. At present you can buy weapons at gun shows without any checks at all, and the same situation obtains when a gun is bought over the internet.

I doubt if Obama's efforts will have any effect on restricting the amount of guns circulating in America. The political right and the very powerful gun lobby (financed, of course, by the gun manufacturers) will make sure any bill is stillborn. But I sure admire him for trying...

The Janus view

In which I look back over the landscape of 2015 and take a squint at what lies ahead in 2016.

2015 can only be called the year of IS. Having occupied huge tracts of land in Iraq and Syria, including several lucrative oilfields, and receiving succour from wealthy men in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, they can almost legitimately be called a state, though not one most people would live in by choice.The shock wave from their advance, combined with the attacks on his own people by Syria's Assad has resulted in the greatest movement of people since the end of World War II. We see the effects of this right here in Cardiff, which has been designated a "dispersal" centre for Wales, and which is now 20% Muslim. The impact is most noticeable in City Road, which is almost 70% non-indigenous. On the upside, most of these are hard working, cheerful folk who simply want to make a decent living, which has resulted in a blossoming of ethnic restaurants, which are enjoyed by as many white people as people from abroad. Cardiff has been a cosmopolitan city for more than 100 years, and we are very good at assimilating new arrivals from foreign parts.

What of the future? Will the bombing of IS diminish their power, and will we see more attacks on the West in reprisal? Unfortunately, the answers are  no and yes respectively. If, on the other hand we can starve them out economically, somehow prevent them selling their oil, somehow persuade the fundamentalist Arab states to stop supporting them, then we might actually get somewhere.

At home, having seen the Tories pull back from their fundamentalist doctrines of supporting the rich and screwing the poor, we must remain on our guard lest they try out their grand plans once again. And then there is the threat, often from the same people, to pull us out of the EU, that flawed behemoth that nonetheless is our only route to the maintenance of our prosperity. The battle will heat up this year as we prepare for the big vote next year. I believe we will vote to stay in, just as the Scots pulled back from the brink in 2014, but it will be bloody struggle.

For me, my first major reading project is to come to grips with James Joyce's famous magnum opus, Finnegans Wake. Regarded by many as unreadable, there is, however, a consensus that holds it up as one of the greatest books ever written, even if much of it appears to be written in an impenetrable code. To assist me in my great task are two books: Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake,  by Finn Fordham, and Annotations,  by Duncan McHugh, which hopefully will illuminate my way. I have allowed up to two months to read, first the Finn Fordham book and then, with Annotations by my side and Joyce's great 628 page text (all editions have exactly 628 pages) on my lap I shall make my way through what is promised to be a "Universal Revelation". I can hardly wait to get started!
Wish me luck...