This got me thinking about the etiquette of blogging about one’s job, and social media generally. Like many people, when I first became active online somewhere between ten and fifteen years ago, I wasn’t always as discreet as I could have been and there were some unfortunate results. Nothing life-changing, as it turned out, but I got close enough to realise the dangers. I resolved to reveal nothing of my RL identity online, and kept my resolution for some years. Partly this was because I was active in LJ fandom and that isn’t something you necessarily want everyone to know about. I now think of this relatively anonymous period as Phase Two of my social media career.

Phase Three is where I am at the present. I think it began when I realised that having a Gravatar ID had its uses. The Internet has now evolved to the point where it can raise serious questions about your credibility if you aren’t prepared to identify yourself at all online. Of course, there’s nothing to stop you having multiple identities of whatever level of weirdness you’re comfortable with. But once I was tweeting reputable RL media about my views on life, the universe and everything, I felt that they were entitled to know my real name, see a photograph and have a few ways of placing me socially in the real world. So I’m generally comfortable with my photograph being freely available.

However, I am decidedly circumspect about the kind of material I blog about. I do not rant about my family relationships or my job, I do not name my friends and I don’t post photographs of my children online – they are old enough to embarrass themselves on Facebook if that’s what they want to do. Nor do I have my own Facebook account – I don’t feel particularly comfortable with the degree of self-exposure that involves and my offspring made it abundantly clear that to do so would feel like a signifiant intrusion of mine into their social networks. I don’t mind giving my opinions, as anyone who follows this blog will know, but I try to keep them intellectual or political rather than personal – if I’m not willing to join a debate, I won’t post.

The whole area of blogging about one’s job, however, is an interesting one. I tend to work on the assumption that anything I write has a reasonable chance of getting traced back to me, and that it’s probably less private than I’d care to believe. A few months ago, after a particularly frustrating string of incidents, I had a little rant about the physical environment I was working in. Shortly afterwards, apparently unprompted, it improved dramatically. I have no official idea what led to said improvement and it’s probably better not to ask. I haven’t blogged about my job since. Most of the time, I really enjoy it. I have my differences of opinion with colleagues but I don’t discuss them online.

National policy issues that could impact on my ability to do my job are fair game, however. They are in the public domain. I think one difficulty with more personal work-related blogging is that most of us tend to talk more about the negative stuff than the days that go well. For that reason, a work blog can come over, quite unfairly, as one long whinge. I’m not sure what the legal position is if nobody can prove who you really are, but it seems possible to me that employers are justified in having a concern about that. Far be it from me to limit free speech, and sometimes whistle-blowing is a regrettable necessity, but it’s far better done under the auspices of unions and other professional bodies, or at least with due consideration rather than an explosion of frustration.

Does all this make me sound very anal? Quite possibly. I’ve spent much of my life writing journals of various sorts and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m rarely as interesting to others as I am to myself, and that even at my relatively advanced age (early fifties) I’m not too old to recoil in horror from the petulant idiot I was a few years ago. I’d prefer to be doing that in private. Google is like the Dark Lord. His arm, as Aragorn was fond of saying grimly, has indeed grown long.

Related articles

• How Do You Solve a Problem like Social Networkers? (globalcompliance.com)
• How to blog and not lose your job (randomreality.blogware.com)

Melanie Pappenheim in Albarn's 'Dr Dee'

We all love a bit of history, don’t we? Lady Mary in Downton being terribly brave, the sexual intrigue of the Tudor court, the carnage of the Western Front, East-Enders having 15 kids in the 1950s, Gawd bless ‘em. It’s on the telly, innit? So it must be true.

But why do we watch? Do we really want to know what it was like? Do we think we already know? Or is it a bit like science-fiction, basically people like us but with interesting funny clothes on? I wonder.

I’d like to think I was a bit too intelligent to fall for the history-as-theme-park line, or that at the very least I ought to be able to deconstruct the narrative and work out a more or less authentic version behind it. But I wonder, sometimes.

A few months ago I saw Damon Albarn’s opera about John Dee, the Elizabethan mage, genius, conjurer – everyone had a different view on him. He thought he could talk to angels. He believed that numbers held the key to the universe, that the descendents of King Arthur (who was related to Elizabeth), had ended up forming colonies in America, that the North-West Passage actually existed and that someday it would be possible to turn base metals into gold. Ha ha. What a fruitcake.

The show, though long on spectacle, was somewhat vague on the biographical side, so I thought I’d check out a couple of books about Dee, and as it turned out, an old friend of my husband’s was writing one. He very kindly sent me the manuscript and I found it tough going. Okay, I’ll admit it, I didn’t get past the first couple of chapters. Anyway, the book is out now and I’ve managed to read it all the way through.

I say managed because I’ll admit it, it wasn’t quite what I’d expected. It didn’t go into day-to-day details about how Dee was taken in by his associate (I’d hesitate to call him friend) Edward Kelley, and eventually agreed to join him for a wife-swap. There was less than I’d have liked about his domestic arrangements at Mortlake, his wife and children. It was all about Tudor Court politics and how Dee wasn’t very good at it. In short, it was a scholarly book, not a popular biography, and very good it was, within those parameters. If you already know a bit about Dee, or about the period, I can recommend it highly.

But the thing I found most challenging was how very different people’s mental outlook was then. In many ways, they weren’t like us at all. They seriously believed the most extraordinary things. Queen Elizabeth truly thought that the Philosopher’s Stone and the distillation of base metal into gold would happen in her lifetime, that if she invested in the research she’d probably be able to make a fortune out of it. Magic wasn’t just something rather flaky and sensational, it was viewed seriously by the highest in the land. And many magicians used methods that would now be described as rigorously scientific, devoting years to painstaking study, experimentation and observation.

Despite my two degrees, I found it incredibly difficult to get into this mindset. To see people from four hundred years ago as inhabiting a very different intellectual landscape. I thought I knew all about the Reformation, but somehow I still expected early modern people to take seriously what I take seriously, or at least to be comprehensible to me. I was guilty of Hollywood-inspired historical laziness.

More balloons in Doctor Who, "Family of Blood"

It raises a worrying possibility. If we think people hundreds of years ago are basically like us, but wearing different clothes and eating different foods, if we ignore the things that make us feel uncomfortable, such as their casual racism, the belief that slavery is not simply tolerable but ordained by God, or the fact that doctors smoked in public in the 1950s, we’re being historical tourists. And that’s only one step away, maybe not even one, from regarding other peoples of the earth in a similar fashion. We make the serious mistake of thinking everybody’s basically the same.

I’ve studied Shakespeare at postgraduate level, so this argument is nothing new to me. People are always saying they love Shakespeare because he was a kind of eternal Everyman, somehow simply knowing the fundamental and unchangeable things about human nature. Well, yes and no. His observations on power would be recognisable to Prince Charles or David Cameron, but it’s worth remembering they still came from a place of believing that kings were divinely appointed to reign and that deposing them threatened the cosmic order, and that laws preventing people of a certain social class going around dressed in velvet were perfectly rational, indeed desirable. History is endlessly absorbing, but like science fiction (which historical dramas resemble in some respects), the way we produce and consume it says as much about us as about the people we purport to be watching or studying.

In history that’s likely to be consumed by children, this is particularly troublesome. Everyone has their strong views on what it isn’t appropriate for them to see. In an episode called The Idiot’s Lantern shown back in 2006, the Doctor and Rose ended up in an English suburb in 1953. Nobody smoked, because that wouldn’t be good for the kiddies to see. More seriously, though, a woman who was being bullied by her husband eventually kicked him out, with the Doctor’s full support, and this was shown as a good thing. Never mind that, back in the 1950s, social pressures kept working-class people in the most appalling marriages. Our particular period has selected the avoidance of unhealthy habits and the encouragement of female autonomy as being desirable values to pass on to the next generation.

As indeed they are. But, while someone over there is mentioning that the boy at the edge of the shot has the wrong haircut or that you never saw glasses like that in 1953, we’re blind to the fact that we have filtered the reality of life in a particular historical period through our own rose-tinted specs to give children a version of history that says a lot more about our values than the ones people had at that time. Values that will probably seem perverse or incomprehensible to people one hundred years from now.

As LP Hartley famously wrote, the past is a different country. They do things differently there.

The Arch-Conjuror of England, by Glyn Parry

Dr Dee, An English Opera

But NASA went bust centuries ago, Laura discovers that she’s the only person who survived the revivication process, and her partner’s mission won’t reach its destination in her lifetime. Worst of all, perhaps, humanity has found alternative solutions and nobody really cares.

Laura’s an appealing character, if a little dogmatic at times. A poet, passionate and romantic, she believes that she has been betrayed and that, regardless of the current circumstances, society is morally bound to honour the sacrifices that the original explorers made and underwrite them, regardless of cost. It’s an argument that cuts little ice with the glacial, cloned manager of the facility, Nicoletta. In her world, clones are accepted as completely human, legislation protects them from offensive language and the imperfections that, Laura feels, make her uniquely human are despised.

Between these two extremes, a male mediator, Stampfer, proposes a compromise. Laura will be humanely killed but everything about her, both physical and emotional, will be uploaded into a data file and made available to her partner, if and when he returns. The only alternative is for Laura to stay alive and live a miserable life on the fringes of society with no means of supporting herself.

What would you do?

"I look like him..." Rose Tyler (probably) isn't buying it

If you’re a fan of Doctor Who, you might have come across this dilemma before. Back at the end of the 2008 series (we won’t go into details) the Doctor managed to grow a second version of himself, one that “had the same memories, same thoughts, same everything,” and left him in another universe with the woman he loved, as a kind of consolation prize. The storyline split Doctor Who fandom down the middle. Many saw it as a happy ending, giving those who appreciate such things a whole imaginative universe to play in. Others were appalled – how could you really love someone, and then settle for his double, while the original person continued to live and suffer without you?

For all its laughable plots, Doctor Who has often shown an uncanny  knack for asking the questions that challenge us to define what makes us human. Futureshock does the same. Laura’s objection to the proposed solution is that the data file “won’t be the real me,” because already she’s had experiences, and laid down new memories, that won’t be included. But eventually she goes along with the proposal. I’d love to have seen a second act where we heard the arguments from her lover’s point of view, assuming he eventually got home.

Science fiction and theatre aren’t natural bedfellows. Maybe it’s because we tend to think of it as epic and spectacular. By contrast, Futureshock, a three-hander on a minimalist set, is a very intimate piece. But, in addition to establishing three characters who were more than just representatives of conflicting positions, it opened up all kinds of cans of worms, shedding light on the preoccupations of contemporary society. There was satire of the way that inhumane, financially-driven government welfare cuts are couched in impersonal language to remove their sting. There was commentary on our idolization of physical perfection and the fickleness of celebrity culture. However, it’s Laura’s philosophical dilemma that stays with me.

If you believe in the concept of a unique human soul that survives after death in a recognisable form, you’re going to have problems with Laura’s fate. On a personal level, what interests me was that I thought it was a humane, pragmatic solution. I understood, without really endorsing, the arguments of the future society that they couldn’t commit in perpetuity to expensive promises made centuries ago for reasons that were no longer relevant to them. This was very different to the way I’d felt about Rose being left with the duplicate Doctor. Admittedly, I’d had years, rather than minutes, to get emotionally invested in the characters in Doctor Who. And I resented being expected to settle for pragmatic compromise. I saw the narrative as an epic romance, and such an ending jarred and did not sit well with me. It was a bit like Aragorn acknowledging that really he’d been a bit silly to go around mooning after an Elven lady for so long, and settling for a quiet life with a nice village girl instead.

That suggests that, when it comes to whether or not we’ll buy into an ending, the tone of the narrative is all-important. Some stories stick up their fingers in a glorious WTF gesture to real life and glory in being an alternative to it. Others make it clear from the start that they’re about ideas rather than feelings. That’s an over-simplification, of course, and the best ones should aim at doing both. Whether or not they succeed is, of course, another matter.

And then there’s post-modernism, and the self-aware narrative. But that’s another story.

Futureshock – review

Ga thought about reminding the Dear Leader that they live in a land where people had been trained to accept any reality presented to them. He considered sharing how there was only one penalty, the ultimate one, for questioning reality, how a citizen could fall into great jeopardy for simply noticing that realities had changed.

Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son, p 418 (Uncorrected proof copy, UK Edition)

 

Suppose we picture North Korea as a gigantic film set, with everyone a conscripted extra.

Christopher Hitchens, Visit to A Small Planet, Vanity Fair, January 2011

Hitchens described Pyongyang as:  “an ‘as if” society. Uniformed female traffic cops do pirouettes at intersections, though there are no cars. Newspapers come out, though they contain no news. Restaurants produce menus of nonexistent dishes. At the airport, there are barely any planes. In the national art gallery—they understand that you have to have a national art gallery—almost all the paintings are of the same two people”.

All despots have the power to impose their own version of reality on their subjects, and North Korea remains the world’s most extreme example of the entire population of a country being co-opted into sustaining one dynasty’s vanity project. Hitchens’ piece is over ten years old but the accounts that continue to trickle out of the Hermit Kingdom suggest that little has changed. It’s lines like a character’s boast, “I’ve been on the internet ten different times,” that bring us up short in Adam Johnson’s remarkable new novel, The Orphan Master’s Son. They remind us that we’re evesdropping on a society so alien that at times his narrative of a North Korean Everyman reads like science-fiction. Living proof, if any were needed, that as Sherlock Holmes once observed, “Reality is stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”

Johnson takes that statement, turns it on its head and spins it around by setting his bildungsroman somewhere in the gap between the real North Korea and the official version, which probably comes closer than any other country on earth to being the creation of one man’s mind. Nobody gets to tell any stories in North Korea apart from the officially sanctioned ones, which constantly change, keeping the population in a state of permanent fear since any failure to acknowledge them will have dreadful consequences. Ironically, this makes at least some North Koreans remarkably creative people, continually striving to come up with a version of what has just happened to them that will please the Dear Leader and allow them to survive. This gives Johnson’s novel a surreal quality that is common to many accounts of life in the DPRK.  Its tone ranges from exquisite tenderness to accounts of gut-churning brutality, with a strong element of John Irving-style picaresque symbolism. At times it’s horrifying, or hilarious – sometimes both at once. (For an interesting account of North Korean humour, see this piece in The Huffington Post by Gabe Mizrahi, who holds the distinction of having produced the first ever podcast from inside the country).

Johnson originally intended to write a funny, ironic piece, called “The Best North Korean short story of 2005.” Then he began to read the testimonies of gulag survivors and was inspired to dig deeper. Much deeper. Wanting to discover, “what people ate for breakfast, what colour their clothes were, what thoughts filled their minds as they drifted off to sleep,” he eventually took the extraordinary step, for an American, of visiting the country personally. He became obsessed with North Korea, gathering information until eventually he was able to move beyond reportage and info-dump and inhabit the psyches of an extraordinary range of characters, up to and including the Great Leader himself.

For obvious reasons, there are virtually no Great North Korean Novels. There are smuggled personal accounts, and the testimonies of defectors, used by Barbara Demick in her book, Nothing to Envy, but Johnson points out that, being the end-product of severe trauma, these statements have their limitations:

“When life is about survival, rather than being human, people are less able to speak in terms of yearning, growth, discovery, change, and so on. How do you gain a deeper understanding of a person who’s been taught that expression is dangerous and that emotions can get you killed? What do you do when the only person who can tell a story is the least able to do so? This is where the limits of nonfiction become visible.”

Johnson’s painstaking research lends authority to his narrative and, initially, the voices of his characters seem muted and distant, their emotions opaque, even to themselves. As we get to know them better, however, this perspective begins to shift, sometimes in surprising ways. It is often the secondary characters that open up a rich vein of insight into this profoundly alien and disturbing society, their casual mentions of the unbearable that transform them from automata to real people. A couple of paragraphs about climbing up to a broken searchlight to harvest and eat the bodies of moths tells us all we need to know about the starvation rations of the prison camps. And when, after many pages, we do hit emotional paydirt, the effect is shattering.

Many clichés have been uttered over the years about love, loyalty, humanity and hope. Some happen to be true. In a world where everything can be taken from you, even your memories and your identities, the tattoo of a loved one on your chest acquires a new significance. It is also far from incidental that the two greatest emotional shifts experienced by the main characters are a direct result of watching movies, one a piece of nationalist propaganda redeemed by the integrity of its leading actress, the other Casablanca. The stories we invest in make us the people that we are. Kim Jong-il built vast private studios and kidnapped a South Korean starlet and her director husband to make his own version of Godzilla. He knew a thing or two about stories, and that was what made him so dangerous. And, above all else, this remarkable and haunting novel is a celebration of why the act of narration is so vital to the human spirit, and so impossible to silence.

NOTE: Johnson’s remarks are taken from a conversation with Richard Powers, published at the conclusion of the an uncorrected proof copy of the Doubleday UK edition of The Orphan Master’s Son. The UK edition will be released on 16 February 2012.

Related articles

• North Korea Outlaws Cell Phones (abcnews.go.com)
• Warm socks sent to North Korea by balloon (msnbc.msn.com)

An American In North Korea – Fascinating images and commentary from Joseph A Ferris III

You don’t normally think of Sunday-night TV drama as a hotbed of political subversion. The usual fare served up is on the soapy side, with the focus on the caring professions and a heavy dose of sanitized nostalgia. Much loved examples include All Creatures Great and Small and Heartbeat, which followed the career of a rural police officer and his GP wife in a Yorkshire village through the Swinging Sixties.

But I think that the BBC might have done something rather clever with Call the Midwife. It was always a fair bet that Jennifer Worth’s memoirs of her experiences as a midwife in the East End of London in the 1950s would be an obvious choice for the Sunday evening slot, even before Miranda Hart joined the cast in the second episode. It’s warm, dramatic, funny and surprisingly gritty. Obviously, one can always pick holes – the hairstyles aren’t all authentic, and was that really a Jumbo Jet flying over in 1954? Obviously, some of the babies are too big – we’d hardly want neonates spending long hours under the TV lights – and everything’s too clean, and hardly anybody seems to smoke. Nevertheless, it’s surprising how well they’ve recreated the birth scenes, particularly given the show’s pre-watershed slot.

It’s ideal heartwarming telly for Austerity Britain (21st century, that is) and it’s already been commissioned for a second series, making this the biggest commitment Auntie has made to new drama for a good while. That must have something to do with the audience of over 9 million – well up into Doctor Who numbers – for the opening episode.

Socially, there’s some willingness to tackle awkward themes. Miranda Hart’s spot-on performance as the ungainly, frightfully posh Chummie, more at home on a horse than on a bike, is pitch perfect and points out the shifting perceptions of class in the immediate post-war years, whilst being unafraid to flag up the spectre of inverted snobbery (Sister Evangelista can’t stand her). And, while we’ve yet to see a black woman give birth, there has been acknowledgement of the ingrained, often unintentional racism of the period – we’ve seen one of the nuns stitching a gollywog doll, and Chummie remarks that her call to be a missionary is based on the fact that “whenever I pray, I see little black faces staring up at me.” (To which one of the good Sisters replies, “Well, you don’t have to go far from here to see that.”)

What is more noticable to me, if not to the generally enthusiastic critics, is that this series is a walking, talking, lactating commercial for the then-brand-new National Health Service and the Welfare State. In Episode One, the mother of a premature baby was told that once he would have had no chance, but because of the NHS he could be offered the very best hospital care. The following week, a woman with a body deformed by rickets, who had lost four previous babies, was successfully delivered of a daughter by Caesarian Section – again, it was made clear, thanks to the NHS. Not only that, but at her ante-natal examination the presiding Doctor went out of his way to tell posh Chummie that the woman’s body had been deformed by poverty, lack of sunlight and malnutrition – all conditions that would shortly be eradicated, thanks to the Welfare State.

Oh, sweet optimism! Is it a complete coincidence, one wonders, that this is being transmitted, almost to the day, as legislation before Parliament threatens the dismantling of large chunks of said welfare-system and the very existence of the NHS? And what about immigration? That premature baby mentioned earlier was the 23rd child of a blissfully happy Anglo-Spanish marriage. The story is right there in the original book, but not in the opening chapters. I can’t imagine the Daily Mail being over the moon about that.

Perhaps the Mail is onto them. Sandra Parsons has written about the sad case of the 15 year old girl lured into prostitution, rescued and allowed to have her baby in a Catholic refuge but forced to give her up, for admittedly sound reasons. It’s difficult to pin down the tone of Parsons’critique. Obviously, she likes the show, but she’s firmly on the side of the Catholics in this one.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this isn’t the last time the Mail mentions Call the Midwife, and next time their response may well be less positive. I actually think that, for once, the BBC’s been rather clever. Nobody wants TV shows to have to pass the commercial test more than the Tories – Cameron recently suggested that, basically, if British films weren’t going to be massively popular and make a mint, guaranteed, they weren’t worth investing taxpayers’money in. Now, in a rather delightfully Gilbertian example of being hoist on their own petard, the Tories may live to curse this cosy show that the BBC has slipped into the schedules right under their noses. You could hardly get better propaganda for the NHS, or for the Welfare State. And it’s very watchable, too.

Related articles

• Call The Midwife wins ratings war with Dancing On Ice (mirror.co.uk)

Coriolanus, the Movie

My weekend (artistically at least) was dominated by stories of war. It began with the new Coriolanus movie on Friday, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes. Coriolanus is one of the great, sprawling tragedies of Shakespeare’s later career. One could almost call it cinematic. There are a lot of short, punchy scenes that flow into each other, conveying information and moving along a complicated plot. In that respect it resembles Anthony and Cleopatra, but is far less romantic. It is, at heart, the story of a man who becomes a war hero in a society where, it is generally assumed, that fits him for high political office. But to succeed as a consul he needs to court the favour of the people, something that due to his proud and austere temperament he is quite unable to do. The play can be opened out further in many different ways, and among these it is an examination of how difficult it is for a society based on warfare and the breeding of warriors to be anything other than dysfunctional. The personal tragedy of Coriolanus himself, a man who only really feels completely alive when he is locked in combat, mirrors this.

Coriolanus also contains one of Shakespeare’s greatest portraits of a mature woman, in the person of the hero’s formidable mother, Volumnia. Volumnia lives vicariously through her only child, all her energy channelled into pride in his military achievements. Her story is a fascinating deconstruction of the accepted ideal of the powerful Roman matron. I wonder, sometimes, if this was a story that had been in Shakespeare’s mind long before he actually wrote it, and if one of the reasons for that was that his portrait of a strong woman whose temperament had been warped by the need to succeed in a world dominated by ultra-masculine values was simply too provocative to put on stage until after Elizabeth’s reign had ended.

The intricate political plot is mirrored and contrasted with Coriolanus’s emotional journey. Locked in a dysfunctional relationship with both his mother and his homeland, he eventually finds intimacy and release in the arms (literally) of his sworn enemy, Aufidius. He defects to the other side after being banished from Rome, a situation brought on by his political ineptitude and inability to conceal his contempt for common humanity. The scene where he offers Aufidius his service, and by implication his love, is one of the most homoerotically charged that Shakespeare ever wrote.

When Coriolanus leads an assault on Rome his desire for revenge is sated but he finds himself caught in an impossible conflict of loyalties when his mother, wife and son come and plead with him to spare his native state. Eventually he capitulates, an act which destroys him and offers Volumnia an empty victory.

It is a story that can be updated easily; the main dilemma faced by a modern film-maker is how to make the hero’s political rise and fall credible without getting bogged down in the lengthy political scenes. Fiennes locates the action in a state called Rome, but actually resembling a Balkan battlefield of civil war. News bulletins and horse-trading in smoke-filled rooms move along the political plot and battle scenes are shot on grainy film with hand-held cameras. The result is a powerful portrait of the violence, mess and sheer destruction war inflicts on communities. I’ve seen bloodier war scenes in movies, but none bleaker. There are some astounding performances, particularly from Fiennes himself and from Vanessa Redgrave as a Volumnia cauterised of any emotion, measuring her love for her son by her pride in the number of scars he bears on his body.

Eddie Redmayne in Birdsong - can a World War One movie be too beautiful?

Watching Birdsong on Sunday was a great contrast, though its subject matter was also the way that warfare destroys the human spirit. I haven’t read Sebastian Faulks’novel, which is very highly thought of, and perhaps because of this I found the characters somewhat flat and opaque. I wonder if it is possible for an adaptation to be too reverent? Birdsong proceeds at a glacial pace, all big close ups and emotional beats stretched out to breaking point. The odd thing was how little any of it engaged me emotionally, even when a bloke’s stomach was ripped open by a shell and he died in agony. I found Stephen impossible to like, or even to relate to, not only in the war scenes but in the earlier ones depicting the passionate affair that haunts him for the rest of his life (though the sex was undoubtedly hot and beautifully photographed).

There is definitely a set of aesthetic values associated with British period drama and I know Birdsong has already been highly praised. I found it tedious and felt a little guilty about my reaction. It is possible even for meticulously recreated shots of the Western Front to look too perfect, and too mired in cinematic cliche, and this effect is magnified when the characters don’t engage us. Ironic, since Birdsong is credited by many as having pioneered a new, realistic depiction of the First World War in fiction. It may be one of those dramas you can’t really appreciate without some knowledge of the original.

It’s not that the First World War in fiction fails to move me. Far from it. I’ve been powerfully affected by Owen and Sassoon’s poetry, and Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, in the latter case so much that I doubt if I could bear to watch the TV adaptation again. But that is because I was inside Vera’s head and heart – I know what she had lost, I understood her howl of despair and frustration when her selfish parents kept pestering her to come back from her work as a war nurse and keep house for them. I was so angry on her behalf, I could hardly bear it. And the punch-in-the-gut realisation, in the last scene of Blackadder Goes Forth, that all these rather daft and very real men were going over the top to their deaths has also remained with me:

It is also possible to convey both the pity and the horror in the simplest of language, accessible even to children, and this short, simple passage from War Horse says more, to me, than hours of the Flanders-porn of Birdsong:

Someone remembered it was Christmas morning, and they sang slow, tuneful carols all the way back. For the most part they were casualties blinded by gas and in their pain some of them cried, as they sang, for their lost sight. We made so many journeys that day and stopped only when the hospital could take no more.

It was already a starry night by the time we reached the farm. The shelling had stopped. There were no flares to light up the sky and blot out the stars. All the way along the lane not a gun fired. Peace had come for one night, one at least. The snow in the yard was crisped by the frost.

MICHAEL MORPURGO War Horse, p 86.

So simple. So incredibly moving. I’ve yet to see what Spielberg does with it, but that’s a tough act to follow.

Related articles

• CORIOLANUS Review (thepeoplesmovies.com)
• ‘Coriolanus’: A Roman warrior, warts and all (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9022627/Ready-for-action-Sebastian-Faulkss-Birdsong-on-the-BBC.html

Sherlock continues to fascinate me and, having exhausted Irene Adler for the time being, a post on this blog by Dan Hartland points out the perennial feature of many Sherlockian narratives – the endeavour either to get inside the Great Sleuth’s head or to set him up, literally for a fall which discredits him, is a natural response to what is, at heart, a superhero narrative. Is Sherlock human at all? Or at least, can he be regarded as a normal human being? If not, then the inclination to distrust him is natural.

John bears witness to his faith in Sherlock’s humanity, whilst standing at his graveside. Unbeknownst to him, Sherlock overhears this testament – not only did John refuse to deny him, but he refused to believe in his own denial. And this is closely linked to another belief, one that he hardly dares to articulate but clings to nevertheless – that Sherlock, his ordeal over, will rise from the dead.

Dan Hartland points out that in both ASiB and THoB we see Sherlock incapacitated and losing control of the rationality that defines him. The second of these Hartland refers to as a “Gethsemane moment.”

How to respond, then, to a problem which does not yield to the rationalistic observation method Sherlock brings to bear upon every problem? He is for a while at a loss, and confesses an extended moment of real doubt to…Holmes – naturally – ultimately solves the mystery. But he does so by passing through a Gethsemane, and the audience enjoys it.

We enjoy this because it appear to reassure us that Holmes shares at least some of our weaknesses, that his all-knowing armour can be pierced and that we can identify with him. Other examples of this are scattered through S2 and Hartland examines some of them.

But shortly after this revelation of Sherlock’s fallibility, he does something that many people would find inhuman. He uses Watson as an experimental subject without his consent and watches impassively for the benefit of proving his theory as he cowers in abject, pharmaceutically-induced fear.

The setting here is significant. Experimental laboratories are a potent source of fear and suspicion for many people, particularly when associated with pharmaceuticals and animals. One could, possibly, even add guilt to that list, since while many of us recoil from the perceived cruelty to animals, we gladly embrace the products that result from the process.

This scene causes us, once more, to question Sherlock’s essential humanity, since he clearly sacrifices his friend’s welfare and autonomy to what is rationally the greater good – ie, solving the case and thereby cleansing the community of evil. My use of religious language is intentional here. Narratives of superhuman beings fascinate us because they allow us to question what it actually means to be human, and one of the most potent of these stories is that of Jesus Christ.

In a neat reversal of the Devil’s command to Christ in the wilderness, “If you really are the Son of God, throw yourself down and his angels will take charge of you and lift you up if you cast your foot against a stone,” Sherlock is called, literally, to throw himself down and appear dead in order to restore our faith in his essential humanity. He redeems himself from the rationality that makes him both fearful and fascinating by showing himself willing to die for his friends, and also willing to submit to the ordeal of losing the reputation that defines him. The final scene sees John grieving at his tomb while he looks on, waiting to reveal himself in an eagerly awaited resurrection.

But can things ever return to the way they were before? In the original, Conan Doyle told us that after he came back, Sherlock was never the same again. He also gave us a married Watson (admittedly before, rather than after, the events of TRF). That’s a possibility that neither Moffatt and Gatiss nor the majority of fan fiction writers have yet explored.

I read a lot of criticism and meta-textual analysis. I have two English degrees, one pre- and one post-theory, and occasionally feel I’ve seen it all. Before I give anyone the impression that I am some sort of cultural titan, most of my critical activity has been focussed on two areas – Shakespeare (the subject of my recent MA) and Doctor Who. I was a late arrival in that odd Internet-driven constituency known as “fandom”, drawn there by the emotional power of David Tennant’s performance as the heartbroken Tenth Doctor in the 2006 episode, Doomsday.

Up to that point, I’d always thought of people who wrote fanfiction as rather odd and a bit sad, definitely in need of Getting a Life. What surprised me was what an intelligent, informed and academic community at least one subsection of Doctor Who fandom turned out to be. Many fan-fiction stories are in fact meta-textual analyses in disguise; they posit alternative plotlines, speculate on what might have happened in between episodes or seek to make the subtextual overt; this leads naturally to discussions of the subtext itself and a variety of possible interpretations. It was in fandom that I gained the confidence to tackle postgraduate study, something I’d been vaguely planning to do for decades.

This essay is not, as it happens, a defence of fandom itself. If anything, it’s a defence of the right of creative people to express themselves, regardless of their limitations. Because we all have them. Dickens, as Stanley Wells, the Shakespeare scholar, notes in his piece for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, “…can be sentimental, diffuse, sententious, preachy, muddly in his plotting, overlong. But I value him for the abundance of his imagination, the variety and warmth of his characterization, his inconsequentialities, digressions and irrelevances, the resonance of his prose, the vitality of his dialogue, the piquancy of his observation, his depth of human feeling.”

The writers of the past often express, overtly or indirectly, political and social views that are now unacceptable to us. For example, the argument that The Merchant of Venice, though possibly liberal for its time, is now unacceptably anti-Semitic, is well documented. If I were a Holocaust survivor, I might well feel that this limitation was too serious a matter for me to appreciate the serious messages Shakespeare’s vision carries about love, loyalty and money, themes that still resonate today. There are critics who feel that The Taming of the Shrew is simply too offensive to be staged, since it presents a reductive view of gender politics that no production, no matter how imaginative, can make acceptable.

All writers have their limitations. These may be cultural, or there may just be things that they don’t do very well. This may not necessarily preclude them being very successful. At the moment the TV series Sherlock has propelled Stephen Moffatt, the current show-runner of Doctor Who, into the stratosphere of popularity. In the blogosphere and indeed in the general press, people have pointed out that his view of women is decidedly lacking in subtlety, and this affects his ability to write convincing characters, particularly female ones. (I won’t go into details here, being reluctant to commit the unforgivable sin of spoiling people who have yet to view the latest episodes). But here’s a link to a piece in the Guardian, written before the Sherlock finale aired, for those who would like to probe into this further.

I happen to agree with these charges and I’ve contributed to more debates than I can remember on whether the last showrunner of Doctor Who did a better job than Moffatt. Both writers had their blind spots and hypothetically there is a perfect text somewhere that lacks them all. However, we live in the real world. I’ve got my views, like everyone, but one thing I would always defend is the right of writers to have a go at something difficult, preferably in public. That doesn’t given them the right to be offensive without being called to account, and close reading of the subtext of any cultural artefact, coupled with the right to discuss it publicly and freely, is essential to a civilized society. For that reason alone, I find it unutterably depressing when armchair (or should that be keyboard?) critics use the Internet as a platform for their own particular versions of “Thou shalt not suffer a witch [insert sexist/racist/insult of choice] to live.” By all means talk about it. Hopefully, the writer under discussion, if s(he) is still alive, will take genuine criticism on board and either up their game or, where possible, call in help. There is evidence that Moffatt does that. On both his high-profile TV series, he tends to delegate the emotional heavy lifting to other writers.

By all means point out a writer’s limitations. It’s fun, if you enjoy the activity as much as I do, and it’s important to do so. Let’s try to avoid the blacklist, however, the fannish flounce that declares, “I’ll never watch this show again!” To return to the example I know best, Moffatt has a vision for Doctor Who that is stronger on myth, symbolism and intricate plotting than it is on the convincing depiction of personal relationships. He doesn’t write very well about how it feels to have your baby abducted, for example. He probably knows that, but it was a story he wanted to tell and he had a go. I admire him for that, even while his portrait of Amy Pond makes me roll my eyes in despair. We make allowances for writers who were professionally active years ago, without suspending our critical faculties. Contemporary writers deserve the same civility. Let us endeavour to celebrate what they manage to do well, whether it’s Our Mutual Friend or Sherlock, and be grateful that they stick their neck out and enrich us all. In their position, our own prejudices would be equally noticeable to others, and probably invisible to ourselves.

Yesterday David Cameron dropped in on a struggling South London school that has recently been transformed, thanks to an army of volunteers working one-to-one with the children several times a week under the auspices of the London Evening Standard campaign Get London Reading. Officially, he was there to open a new library underwritten by a Ukrainian billionaire, furnished by Selfridges and stocked by five leading publishers, who must have been pleased to find a tax-efficient way to offload some of their surplus stock. In an apparently spontaneous development, Cameron even bumped into the House of Commons Sergeant at Arms, Jill Pay, who is one of the volunteers.

What does a Sergeant at Arms do? Well, Mr C explained to the children, “…if you want to stop us politicians talking rubbish…and passing crazy laws…just keep Jill here.”

So perhaps the appropriately named Ms Pay could have a word with him. Perhaps she could tell him that if he really means it when he tells parents, “However busy you are, read to your children,” he could stop libraries from closing, and support Bookstart, an effective programme that gets books into the hands of very young children, and almost collapsed when its budget was threatened by a £13m cut last year. Perhaps he would arrange for people on Jobseeker’s Allowance to volunteer as reading helpers in local schools, not just for an hour here and there, but for long enough not just to start up a library, but to run it.

Because that’s the problem, Mr Cameron. The 1,500 books that have been donated to St Mary’s will languish on the shelves unread, or disappear entirely, if nobody is being paid to look after them. Yes, I said “paid.” Volunteers come and go. Who is going to find the money for a database so the school actually knows where those books are, and when a class in Y3 is doing the Ancient Romans next term you can find the right resources for them? You can get a purpose-built package , but it’ll cost you a more than a grand to install and several hundred pounds a year to run. And believe me, you’d need a lot of volunteers to do the equivalent on 6 x 4 index cards. I know, I’ve tried.

Oh, and while you’re at it, Mr Cameron, could you do something about the way that the school day is so tightly structured that teachers struggle to find 20 minutes a week for a class of five-year-olds to come in and choose their books? Yes, their parents could do it after school, but someone has to be there and see where those books are ending up. And, by the way, the parents of the kids at St Mary’s speak 27 different languages. I’m sure the ones who are struggling with their English will get a lot out of Five Children and It and The Blue Fairy Book (both Folio Society titles, by the way).

Mr Cameron, do you know what your children are actually reading? I don’t mean when you nip home early for a publicity stunt. I mean, what they’d choose to read? Because if they’re anything like the kids in my school, it’ll be Diary of A Wimpy Kid, Star Wars Adventures and the Daisy Meadows Rainbow Magic series. I’d be willing to bet that none of the publishers donated those to St Mary’s, and why should they? They’re businesses, and those books are selling in millions to children whose parents can afford to buy them. By all means encourage every child to aspire to the heights of the Folio Society classics, but it won’t happen overnight. Particularly if there’s no money to pay a librarian, the teachers are too busy to help children make suitable reading choices and the local library closed months ago.

It’s so much easier to make parents feel that it’s all their fault that their children are failing, isn’t it? Perhaps Ms Pay could have a little word with you. Because, you know what? I think you’re being rather silly.

Sign the petition to save libraries: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/1269

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• Libraries key to kids’futures (thesun.co.uk)

Jamie Ballard as Angelo in Measure For Measure) (picture from thegoodreview.co.uk)

Charles Spencer from the Telegraph must really have it in for the RSC this winter season. He condemns their David Edgar play about the King James Bible, Written on the Heart, as “wordy and hard work,” and takes an almost visceral dislike Roxana Silbert’s production of Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s problem comedy of sex and the city. So damning was his verdict on the second that I almost turned in my ticket.

I’m glad I didn’t. It’s important that we support a female director, still a rarity in British theatre, and take her view seriously on this most thought-provoking of plays. M4M features one of his most conflicted and fascinating heroines – Isabella, the novice nun, who values her chastity above her brother’s life when she is sexually propositioned by a corrupt governor, Angelo. It’s a decision that would have made a lot more sense to a Jacobean audience than it does to us. Isabella’s reasoning is simple – Claudio would lose his earthly life, but her eternal soul is at stake; no contest. In a society full of fudge and compromise on all sides, she stands out as one of the few clearly principled characters. The problem is that exactly the same could be said of Angelo, whose refusal to temper justice with mercy puts her in this dreadful position in the first place.

In these post-feminist times it’s not unusual to present Angelo as a woman-hating monster, possibly casting a black actress as Isabella to underline the point. Josette Simon ended up being wrestled to the ground in Hyntner’s 1987 production. But Angelo’s nastiness is equalled and perhaps excelled by that of the Duke, who presents a huge directorial problem by leaving his deputy, clearly in over his head, to organise a social clean-up that he lacks the courage to implement himself, preferring to maintain his popularity by staging his disappearance and then showing up as a friar (a type that would have shrieked duplicity and enabling of licentious behaviour to Shakespeare’s original audience) to interfere with the action, submit Isabella to a horribly cruel deception whilst claiming to help her reprieve her brother and then offer her his hand in marriage in the play’s final moments. Isabella’s silence at this point ranks with Katerina’s last speech in The Taming of The Shrew as a nightmare moment for any modern director.

So, what does Silbert do with all this? Well, she decides not to romanticise the sex industry so there are no tarts with hearts of gold. The pimps and whores are nasty, though entertaining. The guys in the prison look like members of a heavy metal band after a long night, and there is quite a bit of bondage gear  scattered around, although as this rather more positive review points out, that particular theme isn’t followed through as much as some might have hoped. Angelo, a superb performance from Jamie Ballard, is a character whose actions sprang from stress and a deep-seated inability to recognise and comprehend his own emotions. To me, he seemed to exhibit the symptoms of high-level Asperger’s syndrome, not only in his lack of emotional affect but also in his attempt to control complex situations by breaking them down into their component parts and working through them according to an inflexible protocol. This explains his treatment of Mariana, his rejected fiancee. He deserts her because her father’s misfortune prevents him from claiming the pre-arranged dowry, so by Angelo’s remorseless, well-intentioned logic, she no longer ticks all the boxes that add up to marriage. Angelo is clearly unsettled by physical contact; his leather cummerband is worn not as fetish but as protection, and it is Isabella’s innocent placing of her hand on his chest to appeal to his heart that releases his repressed desire for her.

The Duke is a more difficult problem. He doesn’t behave well, and that’s what makes him entertaining. You can either handwave or embrace this unfortunate fact, and Silbert unashamedly chooses the latter, making him into a showman as he produces hidden coins and plot-advancing letters from his sleeves. Here’s a man who has to be the centre of attention, loved and adored by people, with the rictus smile of Tony Blair or David Cameron and the ruthlessness of Simon Cowell. There’s no heavy-handed attempt to make him into a parable of our times; his actions are allowed to speak for themselves, he’s great fun to watch (and knows it) and it’s likely that his torture of Isabella is a deliberate device to make him look all the more bountiful before the (metaphorical) TV cameras when all is resolved. Nobody understood the ambivalence and power of showmanship better than Shakespeare.

Innocence under threat: Jodie McNee as Isabella and Ian Midlane as Elbow in the RSC's Meaure for Measure

Jodie McNee, handed a wonderful part, largely plays it straight with an open face, a modest, old-fashioned frock rather than a wimple and a refreshingly down-to-earth Lancashire accent. Yes, she’s screwed-up, but so is everybody else on stage, some of them in far more dangerous ways. Having attempted to retain her innocence in a murky world, she’s forced to learn the hard way how to function when circumstances thrust her unwillingly into its vortex – she has more in common with Angelo than she knows or would care to acknowledge. It doesn’t justify their bad decisions, but if ever there was a play about human nature in all its complexity and the grinding together of the tectonic plates of principle and pragmatism in urban society, this is it. Like the grit in an oyster (an appropriate aphrodisiac image in a play saturated with sexual and commercial imagery), it continues to disturb and challenge us. The high proportion of young people in the sell-out audience suggest that this production is hitting the right spot.