Splintered Sunrise

As I note the shortlist for this year’s Orwell Prize. The most high-profile entry is Ed Husain’s The Islamist, which may be the people’s choice, but I am tickled to see Nasty Nick’s What’s Left? get a nod.

If you want a little wager, I suspect Nick might be worth a punt. The OP judges have in the past shown themselves quite partial to the tribunes of Decency. Aaro (so light, so fluffy) is a past winner. So is Wheen. So, saints preserve us, is Mad Mel. And, if you prefer to go upmarket, both Ignatieff and Timothy Wishbone Ash are past recipients.

And so a book that has a terminological inexactitude on just about every page gets put up for an award for political writing named after the author of “Politics and the English Language”. I’d like to think old George would have a little chuckle over that.

I normally dig my heels in and resist memes, but a little while back Phil tagged me with a good one. Feel free to join in if you like.

Very simply, grab the nearest book, go to page 123, and write down sentences six to eight. Then see what randomness you come up with. It’s all the rage on the sociology blogs, I believe.

So what we have here is:

Nokorbal agents took the time to make a watertight case and prepare the purge of a party cadre carefully. In June 1977 Tiv Ol, another cultural revolutionist, was arrested. In May and June five more North zone cadres were sent to Tuol Sleng and between June and September another 35 Northwest zone cadres.

Quite. That cheery little passage was from The Eyes of the Pineapple: Revolutionary Intellectuals and Terror in Democratic Kampuchea by RA Burgler (Saarbrücken, 1990). So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

(Actually, I cheated a little. This was the second book I picked up. The first was a Sherrilyn Kenyon novel, and the directions put me in the middle of an energetic shagging scene. I know some readers are a bit sensitive about that sort of thing.)

As I’ve been doing regularly during the Respect crisis, today I took a look at the latest Socialist Worker to see what the comrades have to say for themselves. All we get, though, is a dull article from Commander Begbie about how the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Respect conference is going ahead swimmingly despite attempts (attempts?!) to foment a split, plus a couple of morale-boosting puff pieces from Tower Hamlets, Preston and elsewhere to show the troops that there is something still there.

But while scanning the paper, I noticed none other than my old friend Prof Callinicos putting in his two cents on Norman Mailer. I am glad that Alex shares the same broadly positive opinion of Norm that I have, but I was struck by his little compare-and-contrast at the end with Philip Roth. Alex writes that “In the 1960s, at the height of Mailer’s notoriety, Philip Roth was most famous, not for political engagement, but for the comic epic of masturbation Portnoy’s Complaint.” However, Roth has redeemed himself in recent years by writing explicitly political novels that take aim at the Bush regime.

Well, now. I hope that Alex isn’t attacking the humble pleasures of the J Arthur, which as Woody Allen quipped is at least sex with someone you love. My view is that, while Roth’s more recent work is generally excellent, it’s not a break with his early material so much as a return to form after a long fallow period.

I’ll admit that Portnoy’s Complaint isn’t my favourite Roth novel – that would be The Professor of Desire – but it does have an irresistible nervous energy that makes it a classic of its period. And, more to the point, it simply isn’t true to say that Roth wasn’t interested in politics. There is plenty there for the social critic who looks a little below the surface, as Roth’s exploration of the neuroses of Alex Portnoy touches on aspects of masculinity, Jewishness, class and the changing face of 1960s America.

Really, Alex, you can do better than this slice of neo-Lukácsian social-realist philistine boilerplate. If you want to write about masturbation from a Marxist perspective, first you should read the section on Apostrophe(’) in Ben Watson’s The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. Ask Martin if you don’t get the musical references.

So, farewell then, Norman Mailer.

I liked Norm. Leaving aside his abrasive persona and his, how shall I put this, colourful private life, he was in my humble opinion one of the best modern prose stylists. I liked his novels, even Barbary Shore, whose eccentric political judgements (derived in large part from his connections with the Shachtman movement in the 1940s) don’t really mesh with the experimental style, but is nonetheless a fascinating work.

But, and Norm always hated this, it was as an essayist and a pioneer of the non-fiction novel that he really came into his own. I haven’t read Armies of the Night or The Executioner’s Song in years, but I could still quote chunks off the top of my head.

A lot of people, especially a certain breed of feminist critic, wrote him off as a reactionary old curmudgeon. Not true – Norm was deeply rooted in American radicalism, just of an earlier generation to the new politics of the 1960s, and he never quite caught up with the literary fashions. Likewise, his obsession with violence drew a lot of criticism, and it can be hard to take at times, but that’s like criticising Hunter Thompson for writing too much about drugs. Norm was Norm, warts and all, and I wouldn’t have had him any different.

Last night BBC4 kicked off its season of eighteenth-century sauce with the first half of Andrew Davies’ adaptation of John Cleland’s classic Fanny Hill. I was rather looking forward to this, because it was a daring choice, although I suppose Davies was bound to get around to it eventually while working his way through the English literary canon.

The first instalment dealt with the relatively (and I stress relatively) plot-heavy earlier parts of the novel. In brief, orphaned Lancashire lass Fanny (engaging newcomer Rebecca Night) arrives in London to seek a career in service, only to be taken in by madam Mrs Brown (the very game Alison Steadman) who intends to flog off Fanny’s virginity to the highest bidder. After meeting her true love Charles, Fanny escapes the brothel with her virtue just about intact, and the two lovers shack up together before a penniless Charles is shipped off to the Indies by his evil father and Fanny is left down on her luck. And, well, that’s about it. There is, of course, a reasonable amount of shagging along the way.

Now this is probably the most obvious stumbling block for anyone who wants to adapt Fanny Hill. The usual Davies MO is to take a work from the canon – it may be Austen or Dickens – and spice it up. In this case, he’s had to tone things down massively. The problem is that Fanny Hill is a work of pornography – beautifully written pornography, but still pornography. The 39 separate sex scenes described in minute detail in the novel are not simply the heart of the story, they are literally the bulk of the story. To really capture Fanny Hill faithfully, you would need the production values of BBC costume drama combined with the explicitness of hardcore porn.

Obscenity laws and broadcasting regulations, of course, won’t allow that. All those loving descriptions of erect penises that litter the novel? Can’t show them. Ditto for penetration and ejaculation. The sex scenes we saw last night were plenty by normal costume drama standards – and, if my memory of the novel is correct, I expect things to get racier in the second half – but it wasn’t Tipping the Velvet. In fact, the lesbian scenes between Fanny and Phoebe were a good bit cleaner than those in the 1983 feature film. Trouble is, if you adapt Fanny Hill and tone down the sex, aren’t you just left with, well, something very like Moll Flanders?

Actually, Davies does better than this, and the adaptation isn’t by any means a flop. Rightly, Davies has figured out that Cleland’s great triumph was in the creation of Fanny’s distinctive voice, and the device of having Night pop up to give on-screen narration captures some of the archness of the original. It makes sense to concentrate on the Fanny-Charles love story, although that won’t be sustainable in the shag-heavy second half. He also deftly avoids one of the major pitfalls of period shagging, which is that it often seems too camp for words. (This was one of the big faults of Russell T Davies’ Casanova – during the French Revolution scenes, I almost expected to see Citizen Camembert and the Black Fingernail turning up.) And the casting of Rebecca Night was a great move – she doesn’t just look the part, but carries the lead with genuine charisma.

A qualified success, then. I look forward to seeing how it’s brought to climax.

This week, Gail eschews the obvious target of the BBC and turns her attention to dope-smoking Labour cabinet ministers. There is little to say about this, except to draw attention to Gail’s hilarious stoner dialogue. Do us a favour, love, next time you want to cover drugs, either watch Up in Smoke first or don’t do the stoner thing at all.

Gail also covers Harry Potter. I have no interest in Harry Potter, being an adult, so I don’t know if the books are the “garbage” Gail claims, but I tend to think that anything that gets kids reading can’t be all bad. Gail responds to this by pouring scorn on the idea that kids will automatically move from Harry Potter to classic literature. Well, duh. There isn’t anything automatic about it. I don’t for a second imagine that young men reading Andy McNab novels will spontaneously exclaim, “Ooh, I enjoyed that. Now I think I’ll try some Kazuo Ishiguro.” What depresses me a little is that Gail’s idea of classic literature is The Great Gatsby and fucking Catcher in the Rye, which I assume is what Gail read for A-Level English. I think that if kids are going to study the American novel, we should give them Philip Roth. God knows, Portnoy’s Complaint should have some appeal to teenagers.

Finally, Gail addresses self-publicising loyalist Willie Frazer’s plan for another Love Ulster march in Dublin, and urges the punters to stay away, although she does this in her usual aren’tchasickofit onelot’sasbadastheother style. I note also that Gail repeats the canard that the last Love Ulster march was ambushed by “dissident republicans”. Well, I know that RSF called for a mobilisation, but I’ve seen RSF in action and I don’t recall zimmers being used as offensive weapons at Love Ulster. Nor does looting the Nike store sound like republican behaviour. Besides, I distinctly remember the gardaí arresting two Lithuanians and a Georgian – were they recruited to dissidence at a Wolfe Tones gig in Minsk? Actually, the debacle of Love Ulster in Dublin proves very little about the strength of dissident republicans, but it does prove two points. One is that loyalism isn’t very popular in Dublin, as Harney (of all people) was savvy enough to pick up on. The other is that Dublin is full of young people who would jump at the opportunity to have a pop at the cops. But then, if you accept that you can’t very well take the even-handed “mad loyalists versus mad republicans” line. Hence the Libertyvalancisation of Love Ulster.