Saturday, August 29, 2009

The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk / Review by Hilary Mantel

 



The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk

Hilary Mantel is delighted by a subtle evocation of family life

Hilary Mantel
Saturday 29 August 2009

I

n 2005 Rachel Cusk wrote an article about a book group she had joined. It met each month and was women only. She found that these readers divided books into two types: heavy-going, not heavy-going. When they put Chekhov's short stories in the former group, Cusk broke out in impatience: "Oh, for heaven's sake, I said. What do you want? Lies? More books about time-travel, or some past that never existed, or people who grow wings and fly around the place? Or happy endings, or characters the like of which you'll never meet in your life, or books about things that never actually happen to people?"

So we know what kinds of books she doesn't admire. Down with the past, down with the future, down with the fantastical, the far-flung, the feathery: on your bike, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Milton - and take the brothers Grimm with you. From what she writes herself, we deduce what she would like the book group women to do: take a look at what goes on daily in their own kitchens. She writes to rebut the idea that domestic life, as subject matter, is trivial and whimsical; no one, after all, finds these defects in John Updike. But she is no grime-addict. Her interiors whisper and shiver, as if Virginia Woolf had flitted through. The hours of the day pass through the body of a house, "the sun moving in golden panels across the floorboards".

The action of her seventh novel occupies one year, September to September, and the story is about three brothers, their families and their parents: Thomas, aged 41, newly deployed as a househusband; Antonia his wife, newly promoted to head of her English department; Thomas's elder brother Howard, his younger brother Leo, their various households. Cusk inspects the sibling bond with the thoroughness Ivy Compton Burnett used to bring to the job. Like that author she has an eye, and an ear, for tyrants and manipulators. This is a short novel, and we would like to know the characters better. The more monstrous they are, the more we would like to know them. The father of the three brothers is a lifelong bully of a very particular type: "Leo hears it, that tone, the way it goes over everything, and mechanically levels it, like a tank ... He has never heard his father raise his voice. There has been no need to raise it." There is the teenage daughter who tosses her mane of hair like a recalcitrant Shetland pony, and has "the same spirit of animal vigour about her, the same disproportion of flesh to rationality". Cusk is curt and merciless with her own creations. Even a needy Jack Russell pup has his character scrutinised, and earns his fate, his blackly farcical comeuppance.

Thomas the househusband is learning to play the piano, and the musical references are insistent, as if Cusk thought they were what would hold the novel together; but what holds it together is the skewering quality of her observation. The piano lessons and rehearsals point to another, larger preoccupation - the novel begins by asking "What is art?" The question really is what is it for these people? There is a comic portrait of a mother who insists she is a lapsed artist, and would get to "my studio" if only the chains of duty were looser. Her studio is perhaps too near her house. We know she is compromised, she is self-deluding, she will always arrange some childcare crisis that will prevent her going down the garden path to confront her malnourished talent. Art will never fail these people, but they will fail themselves. They have the intelligence to examine their lives and diagnose what they lack, but they do not have the force of will to grasp what they need. They find it hard to break out of the shell of self, and imagine others as fully alive; they share food, share beds, but there are vast unexplored spaces between them, where their illusions go to shrivel up and die.

It is the author's mix of scorn and compassion that is so bracing. Sometimes she complicates simple things, snarling them in a cat's cradle of abstraction, but just as often, a sentence rewards with its absolute and unexpected precision. A child's eyes are "brown, tawny: in the half-light they seem rich with age, like mahogany". The best moments in her novel are moments of stillness, when the whole of a family, a house, a season, seems suspended, as if in a drop of water for us to examine: "It is October, and the garden is gilded with yellow light. The grass is sodden in the mornings ... She watches the children playing after school in the crisp late afternoon. Their bodies have lost the fluidity of summer, though the weather is fine. They move around the rectangle of lawn in their uniforms, laughing and jostling, throwing sticks for Skittle and laughing when he bounces up to catch them smartly between his jaws. Later, when they have come in and the garden is wrapped in its blue-grey pall of evening, Claudia looks through the window and sees Skittle cavorting alone in the indistinct light. He leaps in the air, his jaw snapping at invisible sticks. She watches his white twisted form, suspended. She can hear the murmur of television from the other room."

It is a reverential moment, like the moment captured in Carol Ann Duffy's poem "Prayer", and it is a virtuoso moment: see how the word "cavorting" traps the leap, the curved and compact form of the dog. It stays on the inner eye, transformative, when the incidents of the story have died away. Cusk's preoccupations, no doubt, are elitist, her narratives slight, her stylistic ambition pronounced. On each of these counts she has received her measure of dislike and distrust from critics and readers. In a review last year of her Italian memoir The Last Supper, Alexander Chancellor ended by saying plaintively: "I sometimes wish that Cusk would hide her cleverness a little." Now why would she want to do that? She has a task and she applies herself to it soberly: the trapping, if only in a mirrored surface, of some fragment of reality that might yield a truth about the whole.

 Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is published by Fourth Estate.

THE GUARDIAN


Thursday, August 27, 2009

Obituaries / Edward Goldsmith


Goldsmith: his 1972 book Blueprint for Survival called for a world order based on small, self-sufficient communities Photograph: The Ecologist

Obituary

Edward Goldsmith

Environmental campaigner and writer who founded The Ecologist magazine

Walter Schwarz
Thursday 27 August 2009 20.20 BST


Edward Goldsmith, who has died aged 80, was an influential environmental scholar, polemicist and campaigner who founded and edited the Ecologist. A special issue in 1972, Blueprint for Survival, proposing the formation of a movement for sustainability, was published as a book, sold 750,000 copies in 17 languages and led to the foundation of the People party, later the Ecology party, which eventually became the Green party.
Blueprint for Survival was a call for a new world order founded not on economic growth but on stable populations of small, self-sufficient communities, similar to those that Goldsmith had seen in his early travels. "I began to see that the survival of primitive people and of the environment were inseparable," he wrote at the time. "Primitive people were disappearing. So was wildlife. I realised that the root problem was economic development. So I decided to start a paper to explore these issues."
However, Goldsmith's extremist, conservative philosophy, opposed to economic development and globalisation in favour of local self-sufficiency, later marginalised him in the green movement, whose politics were moving leftwards. While greens welcomed the Channel tunnel as investment in public transport, he damned it as "designed to further increase our economic activity, exacerbating our rapidly deteriorating environment".
Goldsmith was influenced by the sociological writings of Karl Polanyi, which emphasised the way economies are embedded in society and culture. His travels with his millionaire college friend John Aspinall introduced him to tribal communities on which his later thinking was based. The Ecologist, founded in 1969 and edited by Goldsmith from 1970 to 1989 and 1997-98, was partly financed by his younger brother, James, the billionaire financier.
For all his gloomy prognostication and his passionate commitment to protest, Goldsmith was a gregarious and exuberant bon vivant, a gifted raconteur who hosted parties in his homes in rural Cornwall, London, Paris and the south of France. His sociability, energy and charismatic charm won over even his most bitter critics. He liked to recall that, after attempting a business career in Paris, and failing, he gave his share of the family inheritance to his brother, an investment that laid the foundation for James's fortune and, indirectly, his own prosperity.
Edward Goldsmith

Goldsmith's passion for anti-science and his love of good company and good living combined in his foundation, with Denis de Rougement, Gerard Morgan-Grenville and others, of Ecoropa, a travelling debating society of scientists and writers which met convivially in pleasant parts of France, Italy and Spain and Germany.
His extreme social conservatism led Goldsmith at one stage to give support to an extreme rightwing, racist group in France. That, in part, led to Nicholas Hildyard's departure in 1997 from the Ecologist, which was then edited for 10 years by Goldsmith's nephew, James's son Zac.
Zac Goldsmith, environmental adviser to the Conservative party and prospective parliamentary candidate in Richmond Park, said his uncle "was responsible more than anyone else for waking us from our collective slumber. Radical ideas are no longer so radical – the credit crunch has made that obvious. If we pull through the environmental crisis, we all owe Teddy Goldsmith a debt of gratitude. He never regarded his work and status as ends in themselves, just a means to an end, an approach that today's politicians would do well to emulate."
The environmentalist Jonathon Porritt said: "Teddy was the first person who articulated the essence of sustainability in a complete and uncompromising way. He never worried about realistic possibilities. His mission was to have it all. Not always the most accommodating, but he was at his best applying scientific rigour to a problem."
Goldsmith was the son of Frank Goldsmith, Conservative MP for Stowmarket, Suffolk, from 1910 until 1918 who later ran luxury hotels in France. He was educated at Millfield school and Queen's College, Nassau. At Magdalen College, Oxford, he got a third-class degree in politics, philosophy and economics.
He began campaigning, in flamboyant style, in the February 1974 general election when he stood as the People party candidate at Eye, Suffolk. In protests against intensive farming which degraded the soil, he and his supporters paraded with a camel borrowed from Aspinall's private zoo, bearing the slogan "No Deserts in Suffolk. Vote Goldsmith." Few people did, he lost his deposit and retreated to a Cornish village from where he edited the Ecologist until 1989.
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Goldsmith soon returned to egregious protest when the Central Electricity Board tried to test-dig for a nuclear power station five miles from his home. As the diggers arrived, he blocked the entrance to the site by installing his desk and sat in his chair dictating letters to a secretary. The police declined to intervene and the project was eventually abandoned. In 1979 he contested Cornwall and Plymouth in the European parliamentary election for the Ecology party.
In the 1980s he directed some of his fiercest attacks towards the World Bank, which he saw as financing illusory progress by forcing developing countries to export food while destroying their natural ability to grow it. In an open letter to Tom Clausen, the bank's president, he told him to "stop financing the destruction of the tropical world, the devastation of its remaining forests, the extermination of its wildlife, and the impoverishment and starvation of its human inhabitants".
Another of Goldsmith's targets was big dams, which he saw as spreading poverty by flooding the lands of the poor for the benefit of wealthy industrialists and exporters. Goldsmith and Hildyard published a three-volume study: The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams (1984-92), which was later quoted in protests against dams in other countries.
Yet another consistent target was the UN's food and agricultural organisation, which Goldsmith claimed was controlled by multinational agro-industrial companies. He wrote: "Development may be designed to combat poverty, but it is in fact creating poverty. The main cause of poverty today is environmental degradation caused by economic development. Most people who live in the world's great slums are development refugees."
To combat what he saw as destructive economic development, Goldsmith elaborated his own spiritual philosophy. In his 1992 book The Way, he sought to expand Fritz Schumacher's notion of "Buddhist economics" based on "right livelihood" and "the middle way". Arguing that evolution was "purposeful, not for humans but for the planet", he set forth 66 precepts for "right living," warning against being "blinded by science which is itself a faith and has become an enemy. Ecology is also a faith – in the wisdom of those forces which created us with extraordinary benefits – and in our ability to develop cultural patterns that will enable us to maintain the integrity and wisdom of the natural world."
He saw scientists in their white coats as having "all the attributes of religion – faith, dogma and priesthood". Questioning the notion of objective knowledge, he pointed out that "man is a participant, not an objective observer". Few anthropologists would agree with Goldsmith that traditional societies do not change, but there is perhaps more sympathy for his central thesis that the natural world has wisdom greater than human.
Goldsmith, who was bilingual, launched a French edition of the Ecologist and co-edited a volume in French, La Médicine à la Question (1981). He also created versions of the Ecologist in Spain, Brazil, India and New Zealand. Other books included Can Britain Survive? (1971), The Earth Report (1988, co-edited with Hildyard), 5,000 Days to Save the Planet (1990, with Hildyard and others) and The Case Against the Global Economy (1996, edited with Jerry Mander). He received the Right Livelihood award and was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur for his services to France.
Goldsmith is survived by the son and two daughters from his first marriage, to Gillian Pretty, and by his second wife, Katherine James, and their two sons.
 Edward René David Goldsmith, environmentalist, writer and editor, born 8 November 1928; died 21 August 2009


Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Photographer Chris Levine's best shot / The Queen


A portrait of Queen Elizabeth II with her eyes closed. Photograph: Chris Levine

Photographer Chris Levine's best shot

'I asked her to rest between shots – it was a moment of stillness that just happened'

Andrew Pulver
Wed 19 Aug 2009


I
was commissioned to make a holographic portrait of the Queen in 2004, as part of Jersey's celebrations of its 800-year-old relationship with the monarchy. She was tickled by the idea of having a hologram done. I assumed there would be layers of bureaucracy when it came to telling her what to do — but the truth is, if she wants to be involved, it goes straight on to her desk. She is in control, there's no question about that.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Elizabeth Kolbert / Field Notes from a Catastrophe / Review by Anushka Ashana


Feeling the heat

Anushka Asthana on Field Notes from a Catastrophe
Field Notes from a Catastrophe
by Elizabeth Kolbert

Anushka Asthana
Sunday 12 August 2007 23.55 BST

The Inuit people of Banks Island have no word to describe what we know as a robin. After all, the islanders, 500 miles inside the Arctic Circle, deep in Canada's Northwest Territories, had never seen the creatures until they suddenly turned up in numbers a few years ago. 'We just thought, "Oh gee, it's warming up a little bit,"' islander John Keogak tells Elizabeth Kolbert. 'It was good at the start - warmer winters, you know - but now everything is going so fast.'