One is never enough

Am I missing something, in which case I'll take it kindly if you'll put me right?

I'm getting sick of campaigners saying stuff like "just one woman's death during an abortion is one too many" or "just one child put at risk of passive smoking is one too many" or "just one fox that dies a lingering death [death, you will find, has a tendency to linger] at the hands of a pack of hounds is one too many".

It's not just that dogs don't have hands and one can never be too many of anything if there was none of it in the first place. It's also a poor argument for banning the thing they don't like. Emotive yes, but poor. You might as well say that, since some women also die in childbirth, that's a good case for ending the human race. (There are far better ones than that.) More prosaically, at least one cyclist dies on British roads every year after falling off. Should we therefore ban bikes?

It gives liberals, one of whom I am desperately trying to remain, a bad name.

'The Wild Places' by Robert Macfarlane

It is often said that the only true natural wildernesses in Britain are the tundra tops of Scottish mountains and the storm-battered edges of our rocky coasts. Every landscape in between is either man-made or so moulded that our mark is everywhere. Robert Macfarlane's book 'The Wild Places' is a journey; a search for wild landscapes in Britain and Ireland during which his notions of wildness were transformed.

He begins where we are habituated to look for the wild, in the far west and north: the bird and seal island of Enlli (Bardsey) at the tip of the Llŷn peninsula in Wales; the bays and limestone karsts of Atlantic Ireland; in Scotland, Rannoch Moor, the Cuillin of Skye, Cape Wrath and the wilds of Sutherland. These last are the emptiest, least inhabited places in western Europe. As such they come close to what we think the wilds should be. They are our North-West Territories, our Siberia, or as the Readers' Digest once put it without a trace of a smile, our Outback. But dig deeper, as Macfarlane does, and neither the histories nor our perceptions of these places make for such comparisons. The Highlands were cleansed of people for sheep and of predators for game, and much of Ireland by murder, famine, disease and emigration. Enlli was a place of pilgrimage, sought out by men. The high tide mark of even the farthest Hebridean shore is home to the empty Coca Cola bottle and the discarded trawl net.  Beneath and beyond the scenery, these landscapes too are the work of men.

While I sense he may regret this, Macfarlane accepts it and neither laments nor pines. Rather he begins to seek wildness where we have ceased to look for it; as the book progresses, he moves further south and east in search of the pockets of wildness that remain, and those largely manicured or desecrated landcapes in which to our eyes there is none.

In doing so he questions many of our accepted ideas about wildness. Where we have learnt to crave an ideal of distance, emptiness and the undisturbed in juxtaposition to our networked urban lives, he finds wildness in intimacy, profusion and flux: plant colonies bursting with unseen life in a limestone grint on The Burren; the choked and secret hollow ways worn in the soft rocks of south east England; an old garden reclaimed by nature in long-forgotten East Anglian acres just half a mile from a main road; while sheltering with arctic hares in the lee of a Peak District tor of which 30 million people live within two hours' drive.

'The Wild Places' is a work of imagination not a nature book, and is only partly descriptive. Although each chapter has a more or less precise location, it is titled as a type of landscape: 'Beechwood', 'Ridge', 'Cape', 'Saltmarsh'. Macfarlane also sets his thoughts within a number of contexts: history, folklore, religion, the musings of amateur scientists and eccentrics, and the history of cartography. One of the best parts describes the evolution of maps from creative stories of men's passages through a world of endless variety into the modern-day grids that reduce and restrict such terrains to pre-set symbols; less representations of nature than selective products of technology and distilled, timebound utilitarian need.

This, however, I would rather view as a warning about than a criticism of modern maps, which I think are one of mankind's most beautiful and fertile creations. As with books, what can be read between the contour lines of a map is as significant as and often more inspiring than what is printed on the paper. Macfarlane's message for me is that - whether you are high on the moors or reading one on the loo, as I have done for hours daily since boyhood, my poor mother banging on the ceiling below and demanding what the hell I was up to in there - we must learn to look into the nooks and crannies between and within what seems obvious, settled or merely familiar. So it is with nature, and the wild.

Perhaps the selection of locations - admittedly from thousands of possibilities - could have been broader, although Macfarlane makes no claim to be comprehensive. Perhaps I envy many of the good people the author meets, who can afford or have time to be potters, poets, hemp-weavers, lute-tuners and the like (no Irish names among them in Ireland; no Welsh ones in Wales!) - but envy is a nasty emotion of which I need to be more ashamed than I am, and churlishness is not something this invigorating book deserves.

So switch off - no: destroy, publicly - the SatNav, plan an extra day into both ends of your holidays, pack a picnic, muzzle the kids - no: hand them the map - and learn to travel as well as arrive. And read this book while you do.


'The Wild Places' by Robert Macfarlane, Granta Books

'The Report - a novel', by Jessica Francis Kane

‘The Report’ describes and elaborates upon the events and aftermath of the night of 3^rd March 1943, when 173 people were crushed to death at the entrance to Bethnal Green tube station. It was the worst British civilian disaster of the Second World War.

The tragedy itself is dealt with briefly. Rather, the novel focuses on its effects on local people connected to it by experience, work or family ties, on the subsequent inquiry led by Lawrence Dunne, and on the attempts some 30 years later of a young film director to make a television documentary about what really happened, what the inquiry said and what it left unsaid. The narrative switches between decades and between people, with the planning, the process and the testimonies of Dunne’s inquiry lacing them together.

Although the book deals with deep emotions it isn‘t sentimental, and although its subject is disaster it isn’t spectacular. It infiltrates rather than seizes the imagination. Above all it is concerned with the feelings and motivations of ordinary, decent people trying to make sense of the incomprehensibility of a domestic tragedy within the wider suffering of war: those who witnessed or survived the crush, a shelter warden, a police constable, the local vicar, local officials; Dunne himself, who is both an establishment figure and close to the people he lives among; and Paul, the film director of 30 years later, who tries to discover and revive what time and forgetting had eroded.

Jessica Francis Kane deftly paints a series of impressions of the wartime East End, its streets, homes and people, that amount to more than their sum. Although there is a quiet significance and nobility in many of the characters, she is not nostalgic: we see that Dunne was challenged not just by the Government’s wish to preserve morale at all costs, but also by his own desire to obscure a detail of the disaster for what he perceived to be a greater good, through suppressing a fact which might have been thought by others to betray a less admirable trait of his community.

This hints at the moral complexities and personal fallibilities with which we all have to deal, and for which we should not be judged too harshly in trying to accommodate. This is not just an evocative book, but a valuable one.


'The Report - a novel', by Jessica Francis Kane, Portobello Books

Lines composed upon the Death of Christopher Hitchens

So Hitchens has ceased to prevail
And as fits one so keen to assail
Both the mass and the Mass
With Orwellian class
He's most likely now inside the whale.

His arrows flew straight to the sky
And they fell on the false and the sly
Yet even when plastered
His subjects he mastered
With bottle corked up by the dry.

Though on Bush he was quite out of touch
And on God he protested too much,
Such stuff should be deemed
For the most part redeemed
By his onslaught on Kissinger’s crutch.

And while enemies gathered wholesale,
For he cared not against whom he'd rail,
I humbly submit
He was not such a shit
As his brother who writes for The Mail.

Right now we need more words like Hitch’s
That will scratch in the place where it itches
For if people aren’t strong
When the world thinks them wrong
Tell me who’s left to fight in the ditches?

Spielberg's Adventures of TiiinTiiin!

Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson's first Tintin film, ‘The Secret of the Unicorn’, opened in the UK this week. I saw it in 3D yesterday afternoon with my kids. I’ve been a lover of the Tintin books since the age of 5. My first book was ‘The Crab with the Golden Claws’, in which Tintin meets Haddock for the first time. This was a good choice by the friend of my father's who gave it to me as a present, for Tintin without Haddock, as the film makers were well aware, is like chips without cod. Perhaps for this reason the film of ‘The Secret of the Unicorn’ loosely combines elements of both tales (if we take ‘The Secret of the Unicorn’ and ‘Red Rackham’s Treasure’ as one adventure), although it plays with them freely and adds a lot more to them - or goes well over the top, depending on your point of view.

I went to see it with great anticipation but expecting not to be convinced by it. This wasn't because I thought it would be boring but because I couldn’t imagine how the simplicity and beauty of Hergé’s cartoons and plots could survive the sensory carpet bombing of computer-generated imagery and all it offers to film makers of great imagination, which Spielberg and Jackson are. And because it’s my - and my kids’ - childhood with which these clever guys and fellow Tintin lovers are playing.

‘The Secret of the Unicorn’ is spectacular, gorgeously realised and it races along. It is mostly respectful of Hergé’s characterisations and humour, even tipping its hat with some nice touches after his style, and in some scenes it quite beautifully and atmospherically recreates in its complex entirety the world that Hergé sought to distil on paper, although with the crucial difference that he asked our imaginations not our eyes to do the work of comprehending it. One of the best touches is the flea market with which the film, like the book, opens, and in which Tintin is presented with his portrait by none other than Hergé himself (this was not a nod to Hitchcock: Hergé did it himself more than once in his strips). I was so enchanted that I didn't notice whether money changed hands.

Tintin is well depicted and his features as well as his actions correctly are the calm eye around which the storm of other characters rages. Haddock is well done too, but I can say little more about that without some pain: for me, to animate him is comparable to portraying Allah, not because it’s heretical but because it’s impossible. Haddock is Hergé's Mr Micawber, who, as GK Chesterton once wrote, “... is not a man; he is a superman. We can only walk round and round Micawber wondering what we shall say.” Like him, I’ve been walking round and round Haddock for years wondering what I shall say and I still haven’t got it, so part of me is a bit upset that Spielberg and Jackson should even try to make him real, let alone make it public, and in 3D too. But that’s me. I tend to hold the same view about Basil Fawlty, so ignore me. I'll just point out that Haddock was - no is - English, not Scottish and that his first name, Archibald, to which we are treated too soon, was revealed only in the last completed book ‘Tintin and the Picaros’, and as a joke seemingly at Haddock’s expense, which was a bit unfair as it was Tintin who was getting Hergé down by then. No, Haddock's first name is Captain.

With regard to plot and the other characters, while the reconstituted story holds together well in its own terms, the film does commit some ingenious white-collar crimes (that is to say they'll probably go unpunished), and not simply because of its clever dovetailing of the two books. In the original ‘Secret of the Unicorn’ Sakharine is a red herring not a criminal mastermind. The Bird brothers, who don’t appear in the film and who occupy a fully functioning Marlinspike Hall, are the crooks seeking to match up the three scrolls of parchment hidden in the three replica ships which together are the key to the location of the original Unicorn’s treasure. The Thompsons are good, although their heads are perhaps a bit big and they didn't seem to be taking the business of cocking everything up seriously enough. The operatic diva Bianca Castafiore - somewhat blandly rendered, I thought, or did I expect more from her because I find her cartoon original sexy now that I’ve grown up? - appears in neither book, but is here the unwitting stooge whose high Cs are the only weapon that can break the bullet-proof glass behind which Omar ben Salaad has locked away the last replica ship that Sakharine covets. (Here, oddly, Haddock is seen to fancy Castafiore, a woman whom in the books he spends almost every waking hour trying to avoid.) Ben Salaad, who is the leader of a gang of opium runners in ‘The Crab with the Golden Claws’, is just a rich Moroccan with a taste for opera and show. Allan, the scheming gangster who starts life as the drunken Haddock’s first mate aboard the ‘Karaboudjan’, on which the drugs are being smuggled, is well characterised but less powerful and forceful than he comes across in the books.

Curiously, Haddock’s alcoholism, not the mere sight of the first replica ship, is the key to unlocking his memory of the story of his ancestor Sir Francis Haddock’s battle with Red Rackham, who is depicted as Sakharine’s ancestor too, thus bringing elements of a blood feud and very Hollywoodian notions of 'destiny' into the picture. Ingenious in terms of the new plot, but come on! Likewise, on the quayside of Bhagghar with the ‘Karaboudjan’ having given them the slip, Haddock offers Tintin a most uncharacteristic homily on not giving in when it is normally Tintin, with reluctant but judicious administration of the nearest hard liquor to hand, who summons up Haddock’s Dutch but indefatigable courage. Above all, at the end of the film the needs of commerce outweigh those of faithfulness when Tintin finds a fourth parchment which reveals there is more treasure than is held in the small stone globe at the foot of the Eagle of Patmos in Marlinspike's cellars. And of course inflation alone dictates that audiences would expect nothing less, so expect a sequel soon, combining ‘Red Rackham’s Treasure’ with ... ‘Explorers on the Moon’, perhaps?


Overall ‘The Secret of the Unicorn’ is an exciting, amusing, brilliantly realised and clever movie, and both I and the kids enjoyed it. All CGI films are pretty exciting, and even those that are less so tend to be ingenious. That, rather than any issues of quality, is one of my problems with this one. The capabilty and apparently limitless potential of CGI, both as a tool and a plaything, demand that film makers seek ever better effects from it. It’s also what the box office expects, so they are doubly bound. No triply, because capability and demand unite in a medium that asks nothing more of us than that we sit and absorb the spectacle. It does all our imagining for us, and one day we will find it hard to imagine what it doesn't provide.

One result is that CGI movies are starting to become formulaic. Too often I’m finding that I’ve seen (and heard) them before, not least in the interchangable scores and the required homilies of the type referred to above. In particular, the big action scenes are starting to pall, and especially those that act as the films’ climaxes, which too often are mere displays of virtuosity. They bring to mind many of Carlos Santana's live guitar solos from the late 1970s, in which that brilliant musician seemed determined, despite his talent for beauty and expression, to end every song, however melodic, in a deafening wall of sound. ‘The Secret of the Unicorn’ ends with an overblown and implausible battle of dockyard loading cranes operated by Haddock and Sakharine that has nothing to do with the books from which the film is drawn and everything to do with CGI conventions.

I’m not saying that film versions of Tintin should (or could) be faithful to Hergé’s original cartoons, nor that Hergé wasn’t himself constrained by the conventions of his own genre and the market place of his time, nor that it's not OK to take simple pleasures from his work. My fear is that this immaculately realised conception of Tintin, leaving nothing to the imagination and supported by worldwide marketing and merchandising reach, will become synonymous with what we understand of him and the man who created him, and that it will be the old, dusty, child-mauled, gloriously unKindlable books that will be the afterthought, as it were.

Therefore this film is a call to all of us to read the original Tintin books as soon as possible, whether for the first time or not, even if, like me, you have to sellotape them back together, before our folk memory of them becomes the product of a computer keyboard, however ingenious, and not of the pen of that great man Georges Remi, however dead.

On the 'Haka'

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The Dark Side of The Sun

‎'The Sun', 21st October 2011. As if the people who so joyfully tortured, paraded and murdered Gaddafi give a toss about Lockerbie, PC Fletcher or those who were killed or injured by arms he smuggled to the IRA. What an arrogant, cowardly newspaper, that would ride on the backs of such pygmies and call it the high ground. Not to mention the implication that those innocent victims of Gaddafi it so cynically enlists might consider such obscenity some kind of justice.

Disgusting.