Stuff and Bother, 2022
Books, films and television from the last year
Pride takes first place, I reckon. Wrath is first runner-up because I do, unfortunately, have something of a temper. Nothing violent but I occasionally get in a bridge-burning mood. Sloth barely podiums, taking bronze — which in itself is terrible to think, so deeply do I indulge in it. Another year gone and once again I’ve not only failed to write enough (as the paltry submissions on this website prove), I’ve not read enough either. No doubt I have passed enough hours in front of buzzing screens but any well-brought-up child knows there’s no credit in that. “Content” is the catch-all name under which culture now comes to us; from books to music to YouTube videos it is content to be consumed — a more or less charming companion with which to pass the necessary passing of time. It’s there, it holds your attention, and then, in most cases, it is gone. It fills your attention as food fills your stomach — temporarily. I too slobbed through “Squid Game” — diverting, engrossing and ultimately extremely stupid — but once it was over I might as well not have done. Nothing about it will stick with me. Still, there are those few cultural products that leave a more lasting impression. I thought I’d discuss a few such that I encountered this year.
Of course, the fact that I encountered these things in 2022 does not mean they were made in, released in, or have any particular relevance to 2022. This list will be pretty much entirely solipsistic. What follows then is a more or less random sampling of one man’s more or less random sampling of human culture. They’re not even presented here in the order I read or watched them, and I’m certain to be forgetting something important. I will be “spoiling” everything without compunction or remorse. Please enjoy.
Books
Sylvie - Gérard de Nerval
One hopes not to identify too much with madmen and suicides, but I suspect most men will find it difficult not to while reading Nerval’s novella. The narrator is in love or believes he is in love with three women — the enchanting Adrienne, whom he sees once before she enters a convent, and then once again before she dies young; the actress Aurélia, who rejects his professions of love (probably correctly) as false; and his childhood friend Sylvie, whom if he had not been so fixated on Adrienne and Aurélia he might well have happily spent his life with, but he misses his chance. One might be inclined to blame the narrator’s lack of wisdom or self-knowledge for his ultimate loneliness, but I’m more inclined to call it bad luck — you’re in love with the wrong person. That’s how it is. What can you do about it? The atmosphere of the book is perfect. We are cocooned in the rosy glow of the narrator’s heartache — a misty, cosy, solipsistic den which is occasionally lanced by the icy needles of reality: “During the following days, I wrote her the most tender, most beautiful letters that she had probably ever received. Her replies were full of good sense.” Well — ouch. Highly recommended. It only takes a couple of hours to read. Girls won’t get it.
Middlemarch - George Eliot
You don’t need a man who took until his thirties to read Middlemarch to tell you that it’s good. I’m only really putting it here to boast that I finally got through it, having bounced off it on a number of previous attempts. I don’t know why — it’s not particularly difficult or slow; there’s something interesting on every page. It’s just one of those things. Perhaps I had to be in the right mood. In any case I did read it and I loved it. Of course I fell in love with my fellow Dodo: the ideal woman (it is only a shame that she is married — and, oh, fictional). I’m forced to admit that it’s probably Eliot’s “greatest” novel, containing the most rich collection of insights about humanity, witty lines, and the author’s palpable wisdom — Eliot seems to have known exactly how everyone feels about everything all of the time — but I still have more affection for Silas Marner, which I found more moving. The redemption of Silas is a sublime eucatatastrophe. But this is from Middlemarch: “In such states of mind the most incredulous person has a private leaning towards miracle: impossible to conceive how our wish could be fulfilled, still— very wonderful things have happened!”
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods - Umberto Eco
Hard to say Eco’s collection of Norton Lectures was very enlightening. Unlike, say, James Woods’ How Fiction Works Eco’s tour through the art of fiction is less pragmatic analysis of technique and more concerned with the ontological status of stories. They are, however, very good fun, and you can tell that Eco was entertaining himself. You’ll find here a somewhat grudging apologia for the style of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, and a fascinating and absurd digression on the Rue Servandon in Dumas’ Three Musketeers. Short, witty, erudite, extremely rewarding; dare I say quite nerdy? — Eco was the best.
Baudolino (reread) - Umberto Eco
Third time’s as charming as the first. What a novel! So adventury and moving and sad, with a plot so clever it’ll make your head spin. What a hero we have in Baudolino: a man of peace, adopted son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, and an admitted liar how has made and unmade whole cities with his lies. He tells his story to Niketas of Byzantium. Is he to be trusted? But of course he is — what profit would there be in disbelieving him? So we believe as Baudolino, caught up in a story of his own making, heads East in search of the legendary king Prester John, and encounters in the flesh the mediaeval myths he had done so much to propagate. I always think of this as a holiday read, because one wishes to read it across a very few, very long sittings. But there is almost no novel I would recommend more highly.
The Eisenhorn Trilogy (reread) - Dan Abnett
I first read these books as a teenager, in Florida, while listening over and over again to Muse’s “Absolution”. Whenever I hear “Butterflies and Hurricanes” I feel the urge to read Xenos and rereading these books I heard, unbidden, “Thoughts of a Dying Atheist” drift into my mind. It’s pretty much impossible to know whether the regard in which I hold these books is nostalgia or taste. The fact that they are violent sci-fi adventures based on the Warhammer 40,000 franchise and written by the comic book writer Dan Abnett, you might think, could be a clue — but honestly I think they hold up. They’re pulp but as pulp goes, they’re up there. It’s a shame they’re a spinoff from a tabletop battle game — indeed, the chief weakness of the books is they assume familiarity with the source material, when one would prefer to feel the strangeness fresh (an advantage of Baudolino) — but Abnett really put much more effort and creativity in than he needed to. Look, these are adventure stories, so I won’t spoil them (not least because there’s nothing deeper here to draw out). I guess I can’t really recommend them, either. But I love them, and that’s something.
Berserk (Vol 1-3) - Kentaro Miura
These are Japanese comic books, and I only gave them a chance because they’ve been recommended to me probably a dozen times in my life. I was astonished by the beauty, detail, and effort put into the art. There was an obvious intelligence and patience in the writing — certainly there was nothing rushed, and the writer clearly trusted the audience to wait for answers. But, despite being impressed, I stopped reading anyway. The worst movie I ever watched was the remake of Funny Games. It was released sometime in the noughties, it starred Naomi Watts. It was on TV late one night and I watched it. I watched half of it and thought to myself, this is appalling, I should stop watching. And then I watched it to the end and was ashamed that I’d done so. I believed it would be okay somehow — like, even if there wasn’t a happy ending, it would be worth it. It wasn’t. I should have trusted my instincts and stopped watching because it was appalling. Some things you don’t want to stay with you. I felt diminished by that movie. Berserk is a nasty story. The way it depicts violence is horrific. After reading the first three volumes, I had miserable, violent dreams. I’m going to trust my instincts and never read another word of the thing. I recommend you don’t either.
The King James Bible
I read the Bible as a teenager between the ages of (I think) fourteen and seventeen, reading with sporadic discipline and ever-deepening atheism until it was finished. And then I read Peter Hitchens and discovered that the version of the Bible I had put so much time into reading — the New International — was no good, and all the beauty and poetry I was looking for was still awaiting me in the KJV. Well, I wasn’t about to read the whole thing again, so that was that, until the subject came up in conversation earlier this year. (When one has read the entire Bible, one finds that the subject comes up almost constantly.) I decided to finally put right what had once gone wrong, and read the entire KJV the way it was intended to be read: via audiobook, listened to at 2.5x speed.1 And you know what? Bloody good book, that. Hitchens Younger was quite right. For example, take this, from the Song of Solomon:
Strengthen me with raisins, refresh me with apples, for I am faint with love.
That’s the NIV. Perfectly fine, no doubt. I’m sure it’s a faithful rendering of the Hebrew. Here’s the KJV:
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.
Just obviously better. Even the punctuation is better.
And yes, of course one can read the Bible and remain an atheist. But it’ll make you want to believe. A story of crushing beauty. You knew that and didn’t need me to tell you but you still haven’t read it, have you? Get going.
The Last Temptation of Christ - Nikos Kazantzakis
It’s a great book but one shouldn’t become too defensive about it. It was condemned for blasphemy by the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. Is this because the old sticks-in-the-mud2 who head those churches didn't understand the radical-but-faithful, subversive-but-worshipful art of the Greek genius? No. I'm sure they understood it perfectly, and understood that it's blasphemous, which it undoubtedly is. During the Rushdie affair (shamefully renewed this year), there were some attempts to deny that The Satanic Verses blasphemed against Islam -- an absurdity, since the novel shows the verses in question originating not with the angel Gibreel or with Satan, but from the mind of the Prophet (which of course, they certainly did -- the marks of human politics are all over them). If the Mullahs of Iran had only gone so far as to call The Satanic Verses blasphemous, we would be forced to agree with them. Unfortunately they tried to sentence the author to death3. Luckily for Kazantzakis, the Christian churches are more humane. With what is Christ tempted at last? Life: long life, a normal life -- a wife and family. Old age. Love. As Bob Dylan sang:
Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me "pa"
That must be what it's all about
And crucially (pun accidental), Kazantzakis shows Christ succumbing to this temptation, before being given a “second chance” to go back and die at the appointed hour. His metaphysical status depends on his choice: choosing life, he is not the son of God (and Mary, presumably, is not a virgin). Choosing death, he is. And what can I say? I loved more the Christ who chose life more than the Christ who chose death. It’s a strange and disturbing book. I don’t know if I will ever read it again. I’m not even sure I recommend it.
Paradise Lost (reread) - John Milton
Not to make too much of this, but: it’s nice to read something that only takes a couple of hours. Good for the ego, if things which bolster the ego can be called good. In fact I read it twice, and bits and pieces of it more often than that, in preparation for and reading along with a lecture series on the author.4 I’m trying to become educated; leave me alone. As with the Bible, I hadn't read this since I was a teenager (along with The Divine Comedy -- you know exactly what kind of teenager I was an can probably take a good shot at estimating exactly how many friends I had). Like The Last Temptation of Christ, the question of free will is central here. I thought I had it figured out. Here's what John Milton could have meant, if he were as smart as me: God could have created a world in which good prevails because good is all there is, but the greater good is free obedience to the good by a will with "true freedom". Obedience requires the possibility of disobedience of so this is why God creates Satan — Satan is not disobedient but disobedience itself, a necessary condition for the obedience of mankind. Satan therefore has no free will, only Adam and Eve do. That’s how I’d have written it, if I were even vaguely capable of writing it. However I have been convinced that Milton clearly meant otherwise, and his Satan does have free will, and so the mystery of why God would create such a creature remains. Stupid, really.
But that’s not the point! Here’s the point:
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
George III - Andrew Roberts
I love it when a book challenges my worldview. For example, Andrew Robert’s biography of George III challenged me, an almost comically right-wing Tory, to become more right-wing and more Tory. Quite the challenge! I had previously accepted the common view of George III as yes, King, worthy of the respect a King deserves — but a bad King; inept and, later, capital-M Mad; a sort of British Honorius. Not as bad as a Caligula or Nero, but ultimately not up to it. A nice lad but dim; lost an Empire — not maliciously, but still, careless.
No sir! The Roberts book paints the portrait of a King attentive, careful, intelligent, serious, dutiful — and, of course, long-reigning. A King who created the style of monarchy we know today. Yes, the American business was a cock-up, but Britain under his rule became, on average, richer, more powerful, and, not indifferently, more humane. If George was iffy on the slavery question he was less so than his ministers, and it was by his rule that the foundations for the glorious, world-bestriding (and slavery-eliminating) empire of the Victorians were laid.5
The book also made me reconsider my opinion of Edmund Burke. For a long time I’d considered him a “good Whig”, but here we see a man so committed to partisanship he’d lie and swindle to promote the Whiggish elite. He was sometimes good and sometimes Whiggish, but never both at the same time. Roberts gives the Yanks a well-deserved kicking, too. The Declaration of Independence is humiliated, in detail, as a load of old bollocks, and Jefferson an opportunistic liar. And did you know that blackguard Napoleon had that blackguard Thomas Paine lined up to lead a revolutionary British government in case of a successful invasion? Knob-ends.
The Passenger - Cormac McCarthy
My memory was trying to tell me that McCarthy had won the “McCarthy Genius Prize”, which seems unlikely. It was the MacArthur Genius Grant. Eco never won the Nobel, so what’s a MacArthur worth? Blood Meridian was called the most violent book since the Iliad, which is a very silly thing to say. It’s hard to talk about McCarthy without feeling absurd. Joyce and Nabokov and Pynchon wore their genius lightly. For McCarthy it’s a heavy thing and there are prizes for it. For McCarthy genius is like it was for Faulkner. It’s not much fun. It weighs on every line and there’s no respite in it. I like McCarthy but dear lord.
McCarthy started out writing what in my opinion were pretty bad novels — full of murder and incest and transgression — and then came the baroque brilliance of Suttree and Blood Meridian. All the Pretty Horses marked the beginning of a new phase in his career; one of increased simplicity and reserve, culminating in that extremely stripped-back and straightforward novel The Road. The Passenger is not like that. It’s not like the earlier novels either. It’s like a Pynchon or maybe like Infinite Jest. Everything’s been thrown in here. It’s full of strangeness, a hallucinatory quality (not least because it at times dramatises the characters’ vivid hallucinations), and sprawl; kitchen sink writing. Or rather, it has the elements of kitchen-sink writing while giving only one viewpoint — that of Bobby Western — through which to see them. Western is a perspicacious character but he never really understands what is happening to him. While the mysteries of the novel are never fully explicated we are given to understand that those mysteries go right to the top and the very heart (a necessarily dark heart) of America — or, perhaps not; perhaps it is a big misunderstanding. Cormac McCarthy knows more about theoretical physics than I do and it’s all here, because he didn’t want to hold anything back, and perhaps he likes to show off. The brief snippets of Spanish remain untranslated. It’s a great book but I got to the end feeling like I’d missed something. I haven’t read Stella Maris yet.
Suttree (reread?) - Cormac McCarthy
I remembered Harrogate in the pumpkin patch and the greasy condoms floating in the Tennessee. I remembered Suttree in the workhouse, and Suttree and anti-Suttree, and the poisonous moonshine. I didn’t remember the poisoned meat and the dead bats, the oyster-shucking hunt for pearls and the tragedy it entailed, the typhoid hallucinations, the priest and his church. I thought I’d read Suttree but having reread Suttree, I think probably I only read the first third of Suttree. I’ve read it all now. It’s McCarthy’s best book. Details so rich it’s almost unpleasant, like oversalted stew. I don’t know if it’s possible to learn anything from Suttree and I’m sure this book doesn’t make you a better person, but you’ve got to read it. They gave the guy a prize for being a genius and he deserved it.
Films and Television
The Northman
I didn’t know before I began watching this that it was Hamlet. One can say, no, in fact it’s an adaptation of the Amleth legend on which Shakespeare’s Hamlet was based, but that’s only superficially true. Yes it’s set in the “Migration Era” dark ages. There is no Elsinore and Amleth does not attend university, and his exile is not in Britain6 but in Russia. But there is a kind of Yorick scene. Amleth’s strained relationship with his mother forms a major subplot. Most of all, the fact that violent revenge is at the centre of the story is Shakespeare’s doing; in Saxo Grammaticus, the central pillar of the plot is the prince’s feigned madness, which here as in Shakespeare is pushed out of focus. And as in Shakespeare we see the quest for a kind of justice descend into hopeless nihilism -- Hamlet's "The readiness is all" is replaced by Amleth wanging on about fate. (How was Eggers' script ever going to compete?) There is no Horatio here to invoke choirs of angels, so the ending, which was, I suppose, tragic, left me cold. One could hope for a version of The Harp-Song of the Dane-Women, "What is a woman that you forsake her?", but everyone's too bloody stoical for that. However, the movie sells itself on spectacle and atmosphere, which it delivers wonderfully.
Rings of Power
We all thought this show would be terrible and it turned out to be sort-of okay. The Harfoots are charming, the design work is top-notch, and the writing, though it lacks subtlety and skill, nevertheless at least tries to maintain the dignity and gentleness of Tolkein’s work, and doesn’t turn it into a kind-of off-brand Game of Thrones. It’s not great, but it’s not bad. I’ll watch it again next year.
Better Call Saul
Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, once said during the production of the former show, “I want to believe there's a heaven. But I can't not believe there's a hell.” I once listened to a series of lectures (from The Great Courses) about Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the lecturers began by explaining that they had delivered the same course to university students, to a group of monks, and to convicts at a maximum security prison.7 Students, they said, tended to love the lurid Inferno most; monks, the Paradiso. But the prisoners were most moved by Purgatorio, because it offered them a vision of hope and redemption. (I side with the convicts). The ending of Breaking Bad was suitably infernal. In Dante nobody who finds themselves in Hell expresses remorse — their capacity for redemption has been exhausted. This is what we see with Walter White. He is utterly remorseless in the moment of his death; surrounded by the horror of his crimes, he glories in it. Jimmy McGill (aka Saul Goodman) ends his series quite differently. He takes responsibility for his crimes, pleads guilty, and goes to prison for the rest of his life. His ending is purgatorial, and for that reason, tinged with immense hope and melancholy. “With good behaviour, who knows?” I wept.
Catherine Called Birdy
I disagree with Lena Dunham about everything but I’m perfectly happy to let her be the voice of my generation. I think she’s brilliant. It’s been a long time since her fantastic HBO show Girls ended and she’s finally made a comeback with this movie about a tomboyish and strange teenage girl in mediaeval England. One might expect this to be a heavy-handed feminist tract aimed at long-dead men and women who cannot answer back but you’d be wrong. Dunham is too humane for that; she always writes around feminism but she never lets politics get in the way of human interest. Dunham the activist is loudly “pro-choice”, but the Birdy of her movie lives in permanent mourning for the brothers and sisters who never made it out of her mother’s womb. There is a scene in which her mother is trying, once again, to give birth. The nurses think it is impossible, and say that the baby needs to be killed to save the mother’s life. Birdy’s father refuses, and tells his suffering wife to push harder. Birdy screams that he is killing her. A heartless patriarch using a woman as a disposable baby incubator? Well, no — cut to the next scene, and Birdy’s mother has delivered not one but two healthy babies, and is overwhelmed by joy. The father was right. That same father — a man completely unsuited for violence — saves the day in the final act by fighting a duel for the sake of his daughter. Birdy accepts that one day she will have to marry. The patriarchy is triumphant, and that is presented as a happy ending. And it is. Dunham cannot help herself. Try as she might, she simply cannot stop being based.
The Banshees of Inisherin
Martin McDonagh is known for his dark humour but here the darkness overwhelms the humour. His previous films had given me the expectation that in the end, things would come right, or begin to be right in some way. After all the carnage of In Bruges, Colin Farrell’s suicidal character realises he really wants to live after all. In Seven Psychopaths, Tarantinoesque violence gives way to the possibility of non-violence. Even Three Billboards (the least of his films, in my opinion), there is a suggestion at the end that the desperate, bereaved mother will turn aside from the path of revenge. There is no such spark of redemption in The Banshees of Inisherin. Time and time again the characters of the movie are offered ways out of the pointless horrorshow they have made for themselves and every time they refuse. At the end, they go on refusing. They simply don’t value life enough. McDonagh maintains his cinematic disregard for the integrity of the human body but adds to it the grim, hopeless outlook of his stage plays. The result is a great movie, and it is very funny — but it’s desperately hard to like. That poor fucking donkey.
That’s it from me this year. I hope you found some nuggets of interest, either here or in something else I’ve published in 2022. (Which was, what? one thing?) I will try to write more next year but I make no promises. Thank you for reading, and Merry Christmas.
Some snobs will tell you this doesn’t count as reading. Such snobs have never worked with their hands a day in their lives and probably can’t drive either. No I don’t have a chip on my shoulder. Sometimes your hands and eyes are busy and your brain isn’t — a great deal of reading can be done in that time. Why waste it?
I assume we’re all agreed this is the correct pluralisation.
And still we can say: the Ayatollah Khomeini is dead, and Salman Rushdie is alive.
Hosted online by Paideia Forum, a company which is trying to bring university-level teaching to people like me — working people outside of academia who have limited time and money to spend on education. I don’t know how successful they’ll be in that, but the lectures I attended, delivered by Jane Cooper, were fascinating.
Look, we all know that empires are bad but read any history of the Roman Empire and you know there’s only one real test of whether an Emperor was a Good Emperor or a Bad Emperor: did it grow or did it shrink?
A side note: the is in Welsh legend a figure called Amlawdd Wledig — “Wledig” meaning king or prince. Amlawdd has been identified by some as a Brythonised version of the Germanic name “Amleth”, and chronologically the Amlawdd of Welsh legend and the Amleth of northern legend could have been contemporaries — and of course Amleth famously spent time in exile in Britain, so they could indeed have been the same person. In the Welsh, Amlawdd is identified as the father of Igraine or Ygerne, the mother of King Arthur. The inescapable conclusion is this: Hamlet was King Arthur’s grandpa.
I’m trusting my memory here and it is possible nearly every word of this is false.