Kevin Myers' "Watching the Door": Book Review

This reads as if a mad picaresque tale. Myers as first a reporter for RTÉ (Irish state radio and television) and then as a freelance journalist with no real experience, finds himself wandering into savagery as he hastens north as the Troubles explode. A soldier dies next to him; he witnesses an IRA ambush; he sees children shot to death by snipers. The adjectives pile up: the conditions in 1970s Belfast lead to a life led as lies. Insane, vile, ludicrous, preposterous characterize what happens to everyday situations turned into hidden truths, revealed only behind one’s own doors, to one’s own tribe.

The prose takes one through barricades and checkpoints wittily if not to me always accurately. Perhaps as with Myers’ own encounters when he first ventured into the statelet, today’s intrepid tourists may find the “pathological hospitality” credited to Northerners but Ballymurphy, the admittedly dull housing estate in West Belfast, seemed overstated as “mesmerizingly hideous”. Myers, a mordant critic of nationalist pieties, heaps scorn on incoherent IRA Belfast one-time leader Seamus Twomey. Those for whom Twomey claimed to speak and fight, Myers insists, were rarely asked. “The vote for hostilities was unanimous among those people with guns: and those without were not consulted”. (89) 

Myers pinpoints the problem inherent in Irish republicanism as “an almost autonomous state with an internal folklore that embraces and indoctrinates those admitted to its mysteries. Suffering, either inflicted or endured, is a keynote to its ethos”. (14) He contrasts Twomey’s ravings with today’s republicans with a “telegenic veneer of suited respectability”. Twomey’s the “raw product: a man indoctrinated in the ways of death, who had repeatedly and casually caused men to be murdered. These deeds meant nothing to him: his eyes were not cold but angry, as if he lived his life in a permanently homicidal rage. His soul knew no pity, his conscience no sin”. (91) 

The IRA never wants to claim responsibility, as Myers argues it, for the Troubles; republicans blame a white Cortina’s disappearance before a bombing, or they blame the system. And even when blame’s justified, as with Bloody Sunday, why its fourteen sudden deaths garner far more publicity than the fifteen blown up by loyalist terrorists a month earlier at McGurk’s pub mystifies him as a reporter. But, such news ensures his own paycheck, and his pursuit of such horrors creates his own career. 

Not that the British troops, their commanders, the loyalist paramilitaries, the nutting squads escape opprobrium. “Everyone in Northern Ireland lied. Everyone, without exception: republicans, loyalists, soldiers, police—everyone. Lying is easy in such a place. It is the default mode to which everyone turns when there is no consensus about truth. In the absence of an agreed reality, truth is whatever you’re having yourself”. (117-8) Myers names the victims, and makes us watch as they die. He tallies forty people he knew who died in the North, and another eight he did not, but whom he watched die. We like him are forced to remember how statistics cloak murder, and how anguish shatters those left behind.

Myers rails against the warped Fenian perspective for those trapped there by their own stubbornness. “The Northern Irish nationalist ghetto experience” ensured that those “north of the drumlins concocted stereotypes, and then lived their lives surrounded by these people of their own imagination”. (145) As the son of Dubliners who left during WWII for work in Britain, his first name and his own English accent from his Leicester upbringing mark him as close enough to be suspected for his Catholic loyalties, foreign enough to stand out among the unionists. He’s also suspected as an undercover British officer spying on the paramilitaries. He judges himself one of the only men frequenting both the Falls and the Shankill Roads as he crosses sectarian lines to drink among those thugs who—as with the sinister UVF loyalist despot “Rab Brown”-- may plot his own demise from within the pub, if later that very night. 

As the decade and the Troubles grind on, Myers loses his bearings. He struggles to find work, to keep girlfriends (although he beds an impressive number), and to stay sane amidst the “exonerative moral machinery” which grinds down his resistance to republican rhetoric and unionist idiocy. As a “semi-hippy”, his loyalty to the factions supposedly fighting against imperialism turn tested as the Official IRA’s contorted justifications for capitalist gain in the service of a Marxist revolution confound even him. (See my Amazon US review of "The Lost Revolution" by Brian Hanley & Scott Millar; this cites Myers briefly.)

Everyone fighting against the Crown gets paid by it, for housing, rebuilding grants, the dole, and this turns the first war where both enemies benefit from a common benefactor and (sometimes) foe. The years wear him down, as he hears over and over how the IRA allows its members immunity for the most hideous outrages. The cant of its volunteers and the endlessly one-sided recital of their woes disgust him. “For immunity-to-consequence was both a by-product of the Troubles, and its fuel, rather as a nuclear reactor can run on its own waste”. (230) 

Still, Myers for all his acerbic contempt for all involved in taking a guerrilla war into a densely populated city manages to admit the “compulsive generosity” and unbroken gallantry of a resilient and kind resident who endures in the West Belfast ghettoes with admirable good will and innate decency. He fills the narrative with vivid reportage from his perspective, starting with the Shaws Road ambush he tape recorded after he stumbled upon its IRA setup, and continuing into Robert Bankier’s last breath as a British soldier, the final moments of Rose McCartney and Patrick O’Neill at the hands of loyalist killers, and a bomb attack Myers narrowly misses meant for that “deeply manipulative” republican apologist to “revolutionary tourists”, John McGuffin. Myers provides abundant tragedy, danger, and narrow escapes. 

Luckily, he intersperses happier tales. His best, such as Lady Henrietta Guinness meeting the consumers of her family’s stout in West Belfast’s pubs, combine a poignant moment with a satirical relish for the absurd that all too often became the ordinary. He loves relating his two escapades when the man of the house returned and Myers had to hide from the cuckold; his visit to his friend Barney’s brothel, surely the least successful in all of Ulster, represents a comic triumph. My favorite episode, near the end of this often dispiriting narrative, managed to lift my spirits. His hosting of Shannon, an utterly unspeakable American feminist, who befuddles Myers with her contradictions, as a splendid set piece succeeds. 

His memoir confronts his own complicity as a journalist who becomes too intimate with those who he meets, for Myers looks back upon his own compulsion to mix with the natives turned friends, lovers, and neighbors. Malachi O’Doherty’s The Telling Year: Belfast 1972 (see my Amazon or "Blogtrotter" review)  documents a similar experience by a fellow journalist, but a native who finds himself reporting on his own neighbors. As for Myers, he attempts to reduce the tension. He arranges a meeting across enemy lines.  This backfires. He flees to another district after loyalist brutes through whom he tried to broker a truce target him. Everyone talks to him, but Myers learns that half-truths fill their admissions. He is never trusted enough by any side.

Nobody’s innocent, at least those who he estimates provided fifty silent supporters in every community for the one among them who fired back. Certainly, his judgment of the IRA also stands for the recruits and activists whom the republicans fought. Loyalists and “security forces” indulged in their own equally lucrative, cynical, and repellent campaigns. While history often earned the appeal and politics the justification for violence and intimidation, Myers denies their ideological legitimacy. “The Provisional IRA did not consult the living, only the past and future: the present meant nothing to them”. (226) 

Of the catalyst for the deaths which sparked the doomed Peace People, Myers writes that the only sacrifices which mattered to the republicans were when the wrongs were committed by the other side. In this spiral of violence, it reminded me of Orwell’s 1984. As in Oceania, the IRA declared war against one if not always two of its opponents, as allies turned sudden enemies and friends were targeted as foes. This malignant maelstrom before decade’s end spun him out of the province, as he tried to escape the degradation that corroded his professional career and personal life. As I finished, I wondered what he learned, for the back cover tells us he went on to cover civil war in 1980s Lebanon and 1990s Bosnia. (Posted in slightly shorter and edited form to Lunch.com & Amazon US 4-26-11. In much shorter form to Slugger O'Toole, this popular Irish-British political-cultural portal, 11-3-11.)

Brian Hanley & Scott Millar's "The Lost Revolution": Book Review

How Fenians turned leftists, and then split into militants and paramilitaries, one faction campaigning, the other operatives bankrobbing, to bring about a 32-County Socialist Republic sounds familiar. But this isn't the Sinn Féin and IRA most know (at least outside Ireland). The Provisionals, who took the media and then political spotlight, split in 1969-70 from the original, then-Marxist republicans, who were forced to call themselves Officials, but their put-down as Sticks or Stickies soon stuck (the way they wore their Easter lily pin) while Pinheads for their soon-to-be bitter rivals more than cousins never did. Brian Hanley's written a fine history of the earlier IRA, in its humbled incarnation 1926-36 after it fell from power after the Civil War and the rise of its enemies as the Free State. So, he and journalist Scott Millar possess the acumen and patience necessary to finally tell the Official's story, after five years of interviews and research.

As with the IRA in the 20c, victories proved brief and setbacks long-lived. The narrative recalls the years of regrouping after the failure of Operation Harvest, a futile late-1950s guerrilla action in the North of Ireland. Leaders entertained a political wing to accompany the traditional "physical-force" strategy. Gradually, as British-trained Communists and radicals coalesced around a Dublin-based core of believers, the 1960s found republicans involved in civil rights, resistance to British and foreign-owned businesses and property holders, and causes that placed the activists more and more on Ireland's tiny far-left, even as many republicans carried the considerable counterweight of Catholic dogma.

The dense details add up, and livelier sections of this study retell stories that any student of Irish history the past half-century will know well. However, as the perspective's for once not from the predominant Provo-oriented side, it's fresher even if often familiar. The shift in the angle reveals how bitter the Official-Provo feuds became, and how the momentum early in the 70s lay with the OIRA, given their strength in numbers and more coherent, if increasingly far-left rhetoric. This politically correct, undeviating, relentlessly logical mindset doubtless alienated more than it wooed.

The logic of their Communist and Marxist ideology led the Officials to oppose the elevation of the cause of the hunger strikers (four of whom started off with the Officials before their second split that led to the INLA-IRSP formation not long into the 70s), to back the RUC and state security forces against the Provos (despite inevitable cooperation between some republicans however unapproved during most of the Troubles), and backed by a British Communist "two-nation theory," the argument that the British community in the North had as much right to political determination of their future as did the island's Catholic majority. How this was sold to the largely native, pro-republican community, angered and turning to tit-for-tat sectarianism in revenge and self-defense however politically incorrect, remains despite this six-hundred-page study largely a mystery.

That is, I wondered how the Officials in their Sinn Féin-the Workers' Party stage (they also articulated a stagist model that argued to support the British presence for now, so as to better overthrow it come the impending dawn of Irish working-class socialism later), managed to convince their cadres, to get the vote out (often 1-2% of the total in the 26 Counties but enough by the early '80s on Ireland's preferential system to earn them up to seven representatives in the Dáil or Irish parliament, and a chance to topple one coalition), and to motivate so few to do so much for so long against what I expect were very long odds indeed.

Millar and Hanley do their best to keep the anecdotes coming, analyze the manifestoes, scour the press, and talk to the participants, their enemies, and their often rather befuddled neighbors and colleagues and recruits. And in an era when global capital appears to have won despite its own internal schisms and lack of compassion, it's bracing to read again such as Cathal Goulding after Allende's overthrow: "At what point in history was it ever possible to say to the power hungry and the rich: stop, you have had enough. You cannot ask the tiger for mercy." (267)

The Officials did perpetuate, from the 60s on, the image of the hairy-git, the dismal tract and the stolid placard-waving march. John Arden, a playwright (many intellectuals and journalists passed through their mandated study circles, more it seems in Ireland than graduated from the Provos' "University of Revolution" at such as Long Kesh prison) lamented (as he was expelled as were many progressive idealists who couldn't put up with the Leninist discipline and the Stalinist tendencies for "democratic centralism") how these politically ambitious comrades would soon be in Leinster House, "talking big and keeping quiet," while there they'd find "many masters of your craft already seated in the Dáil ready and willing to instruct your apprentice legislators." (249-250). This ambition to enter the political structures of the Irish (and Northern Irish) establishment distinguished them from their Provo rivals, who disdained this treason, at least for a few decades.

As the years went on, the Official IRA was shunted underground; by 1977 or so, the military wing had its feathers trimmed by the political Sinn Féiners who sought Protestant support for their non-sectarian platform. This naturally distanced themselves from the Catholic republican alliance, but it did win them (a few) converts from across the sectarian divide. Most republicans clung to their guns, so the Officials had a hard time convincing their "natural" constituency to surrender their ancestral and communal loyalties to Fenian identity.

In the aftermath of the Workers' Party (who dropped Sinn Féin as the vestige of an unwanted legacy) breakthough into the Dáil as kingmakers in the early 80s, they faltered. They backed an oil refinery in Dublin Bay and mocked environmentalists. They idolized industry but baited tax-dodging farmers. Their principled opposition to Provisional pieties and the cult of the hunger strikers (as they denigrated or downplayed it) made it imperative that they replace their republican base, dwindling, with a wider leftist one across Ireland. Paul Bew and Henry Patterson noted in '83 how the WP had been "reduced to a hard core of support in Catholic areas" of the North even as it continued to "expose the gap between the verbose professions of generosity and non-sectarianism of both constitutional and non-constitutional nationalism and the rather seamy reality." (499)

This sordidness also defined the Provos' one-time comrades turned enemies more than estranged relatives. Even if "special activities" of what internal WP documents called "Group B" occluded the role of the OIRA, everyone knew of their continued existence, and their threats backed up with guns, forgery, counterfeiting, and deals that led to North Korean, Soviet and Iraqi (in the regime of Saddam Hussein) skulduggery. The theories expounded by the WP drove them to oppose Solidarity, praise Kim Il-Sung, and condemn the Hungarians who rose up against tanks in 1956. The Officials were unbending leftists, who pitilessly conducted their own purges, secret trials, doublespeak, and endless self-correction. They bowed to state socialists as totalitarians-- against the rebels and dissidents; so they seemed, as the Cold War ended, to risk derision.

Paddy Woodward, in 1991 as the Officials' beloved USSR collapsed, critiqued the WP's groupthink. The OIRA to their credit gave up their futile military campaign (if not their criminality) but they perpetuated among their co-conspirators their fatal "cult of authoritarianism, the fetish for discipline," which however necessary for a paramilitary wing, poisoned their political balance. Woodward noted how the party was seen as too Communist: "rigid, hard, masculine," and their expansion into what the party pitched as their PR move to entice the "white-collar, professional, female house-owning sector" appeared limited. (566)

The internal contradictions tore the movement apart. As socialism's appeal dimmed and post-glasnost capitalism glowed, the appeal of the WP appeared miniscule. Scandals tore apart the few remaining after yet another split, the Democratic Left party, and by the end of this long march, the few remaining inspire less sympathy than they do detachment. The WP could not detach itself from its own thuggery that accompanied its slogans. Read this and remember the deaths of such fellow Irish, workers and children, those whom the party and the army claimed to liberate: Good Samaritan Sammy Llewellyn, census taker Patricia Mathers, ten-year-old bomb victim Kevin McMenamin, six-year-old Eileen Kelly shot instead of her father; the Provos apologized afterwards. They had meant to kill her Official father in one of thousands of score-settling feuds.

As often elsewhere in documenting the contradictory course of republican justification over the past forty years, ex-PIRA participant-observer Anthony McIntyre's here cited. This book nears its end with his prescient 29 October 2002 obituary in The Blanket:

the seeming losers in those feuds – the Officials – must be sitting wryly observing that, body counts apart, they ultimately came out on top. We, who wanted to kill them – because they argued to go into Stormont, to remain on ceasefire, support the reform of the RUC, uphold the consent principle and dismiss as rejectionist others who disagreed with them – are now forced to pretend that somehow we are really different from them; that they were incorrigible reformists while we were incorruptible revolutionaries; that killing them had some major strategic rationale. And all the while the truth ‘sticks’ in our throats. They beat us to it – and started the peace process first. (598-599)

This history remains a welcome contribution. Many pages I admit did dull me with diligent records of bickering and revenge, pedantry and platforms, but as with any political entity, these first-hand findings deserve inclusion. These depict the applauded activity (and shadowy skulduggery) of those who aspire to power.

What I wondered is how convinced the less heralded members of the OIRA and WP were of the imminent revolution, the takeover of the island, the fact that victory could be theirs despite woeful ballot results and their increasing military and then political marginalization. Leaders are often quoted from the party, ideologues and speechmakers, but the voices of the volunteer, the canvasser, the prisoner, the recruit, as perhaps with any such organization, lurk more in the anonymous quotes, the quieter sense of rueful vengeance and youthful dreaming.

The index is slightly incomplete, but typos are nearly absent; the compilation of details and the attention to primary sources represents a lasting work. So many books about and by the Provos crowd the shelves. Now, we have one substantial study of their common ancestors turned in the course of days or months distant cousins, if still next-door neighbors.

(Here's a recent review on Only a Northern Song which I found after writing mine, as I was searching for McIntyre's original citation. Link to his current blog, The Pensive Quill and to his archived The Blanket. The moment I typed this, the BBC aired a segment on the Real IRA's opposition to the Queen's Irish visit.)

(Posted in condensed form to Amazon US & Lunch.com 4-25-11)

Troy Parfitt's "Why China Will Never Rule the World": Book Review

Neither panda hugger nor dragon slayer, Sinophile or Sinophobe, after a decade teaching English in Taiwan, this author took his first mainland tour, three months the year before the 2008 Olympics. This Canadian ex-pat, during his travels, intersperses a sharp, witty, droll commentary on his encounters with a casual yet erudite retelling of the events and leaders who built--for mostly worse rather than better--modern China. His title sums up his thesis. Any talk of a Chinese "hegemon" is just that, rhetoric more than action, for a nation mired in Confucian slogans, incurious outlooks, slavish conformity, and myopic visions.

Parfitt, inspired by Paul Theroux's train journey twenty-odd years before, loops across the south on his first leg. He begins in Hong Kong and Macau. He notes how "houses are akin to Chinese characters; they are fundamentally erect and possess a rough degree of uniformity, yet they are always unique; an infinite array of strokes and angles. Streets run like sentences; neighbourhoods like paragraphs." (45) His pithy knack of observing complexity within compressed prose marks this narrative.

Less aloof (if slightly?) than Theroux, Parfitt also appears less snobbish. He never hides his disdain for so much of a Chinese urban scene made up of McDonalds, KFC (although he dines at both) and of course Starbucks, but when praise is due a tender moment of assistance from however rare a passerby, Parfitt fairly records that encounter as often as the very frequent times when he's gawked at, gawped at, mocked, or snickered at. He as with any foreigner, it appears, but maybe more with him due to his neat beard and bearish stature, also incites contempt, belligerence, titters, and xenophobia.

Luckily, he speaks and reads Mandarin. He can play the fool, the naive tourist, when it suits his camouflage. He even dons an orange hat with a grinning squid emblem so as to both stand out and blend in. Or, he can chat away with the locals. This talent intrigued me. He's neither the old "China hand" weighing in tiresomely on every conversation and fact he compiles, nor is he the ignorant Westerner unable to comprehend the passing jibe or astonished mutter which seem to come in his wake, every fifty meters.

He can't beg a bottle of water, a room key for a hotel, or directions from a cabbie as to a river, a street, a museum in the driver's own hometown, but he does get solicited. Business cards and phone calls after check in offer massages on cue; would-be masseuses accost him. This gets to be a running gag, were it not so tiresome. Parfitt, by showing how these routines grind him down amidst the litter, the stench, the megaphones, the rudeness, the chaos of a pliable, irritating, relentlessly noisy and smugly infuriating populace, remains fair-minded. That is, he's able to explain why what he sees came about the way it did.

The ambition of most of whom he meets to swindle the newcomer, foreign or domestic, evolves from a Confucian mindset. In Guangzhou, he muses how the natives fool not only the outsiders, but themselves: "The Chinese penchant for replication" of fakery, of forced or real naivete, of willed incompetence, safeguards power. (79) Ignorance runs so deep, after thousands of years, that nobody believes anything anymore. Except, it seems, their own dominance. They are heirs to the Middle Kingdom in a Sinocentric cosmos.

One must never get angry at somebody else, for that will cause them to lose face. But, fights and brawls break out in public as Parfitt strolls about, as if daily occurrences. He reasons that the childish nature of his spiteful hosts comes from not saving "face" so much as from their indulgence of "a licence for people to behave however they please." (105)

He analyzes Lu Xun's Candide-like character of Ah-Q and Taiwanese dissident Bo Yang to demonstrate two homegrown critics of Chinese illogic, prejudice, paranoia, sadism, crudeness, petulance, and a dozen or two more such attributes. Yang's quoted: "A Chinese with an inferiority complex is a slave; a Chinese with a superiority complex is a tyrant." (226) Neither quality engenders self-respect, and based on this crippling pair of qualities, Parfitt finds the Chinese unbalanced, unable to accept that their way's not the best way for the rest of the world-- if they even consider the rest of the world. Yang adds that while the Chinese treat foreigners best (which made me wonder, after Parfitt's testimony), that they treat each other "with the gentility appropriate to a blitzkrieg."

Their lack of knowledge of the planet they are supposed to be about to conquer, Parfitt finds, reveals itself in hundreds of conversations. Nobody he talks to, even the head of a Canadian Confucian Institute, can articulate why that philosophy's to be emulated and to be the model for the rest of the globe. They parrot these ancient analects, but they cannot interpret their venerated wisdom or expound upon their proverbial precepts. Parfitt scrutinizes centuries of dimwitted self-satisfaction. He visits a Museum of the Revolution in Beijing, but it's closed, as it nearly always is. The PRC present keeps having to reinvent its past. For, in this Orwellian society (the book's full of parallels which Parfitt inserts from the pages of "1984"), reinvention trumps access to information. Itself a rare commodity, if true, in China.

He shares a wry eye for the telling detail that reveals duplicity. On a poster of a man to be executed for smuggling, Parfitt observes a separate photo of the thief's "contraband: a treasure chest filled with gold coins. It looked like a clip art image that you'd find in Microsoft Office." (237) Legalism from Confucius, the law from the Communist Party, the paradigm of a strong state and a weak people: all combine to dessicate the spirit. Based on feudal custom, no liberalization will accompany China's lurch into free markets. Democracy, Parfitt insists, will not follow automatically from capitalism. Totalitarianism prevents egalitarianism.

The West, he chides, projects its fears and desires upon the East. The pious seek converts, the profiteer exploits labor, the neo-con fears competition. Any boasts by Chinese or Western champions of its global domination, Parfitt argues, keep begging the question of what exactly makes China so great today. Besides their sheer numbers, what's the reason for their top rank? China's own people fail to answer his Socratically argued challenges. They're unable to think for themselves. They cannot prove their own proverbial expertise.

He's driven mad by the tautologies of his interlocutors. "Proponents needn't provide evidence; it was just something they knew. Others were required to either believe or be quiet. Sceptics were heretical, incapable of seeing the light." (263) China's destined for greatness because China has always been great.

But, on the same page, his tone lightens. This book's far from a gloomy catalogue of horrors and cant. "I spent an hour strolling around Nanjing University's campus examining women's underwear, but only because it was hanging in nearly every barred-up balcony I passed." Two pages on, getting out of Nanjing to fly to Xian, he begins a chapter: "In the queue for the check-in counter at the airport, four people took the foot of space between me and the person in front of me to be their own." (265) In the more northerly city of Hangzhou, it's "damp and foggy, and there were no shadows. It was as if I were existing in a Tupperware container." (282)

Despite an horrific time on a Yangtze River cruise, he conveys one of dozens of delicate descriptions within four-hundred pages of frequent glimpses of charm. "The brown enamelled waterway arced gently into the distance where it was pinched by a pair of lush hills. It rippled at the edges, as though an elongated pane of tinted glass had been scratched repeatedly by a diamond. Among these scratches were scissored silhouettes of men in conical hats standing atop uncertain rafts." (144) This typifies the care with which Parfitt assembles his travels for us. He educates while we enjoy our lessons.

His far-ranging (17 out of 23 provinces--counting Taiwan!) journey takes him to Lhasa by plane, if briefly. Rather than the usual sources which lament the Reds and glorify the Buddhists, he cites Ma Jian's lurid tales and Patrick French's sobering, revisionist "Tibet, Tibet" (compare his review to my review). While Parfitt's book lacks an index or illustrations, its accessible content, via such popular sources as Sterling Seagrave's "The Soong Dynasty" about the three sisters connected with Sun Yat-Sen and Chiang Kai-Shek's power bids, appeals to me as a general reader. He gives a few footnotes as asides. He includes a bibliography, if not documentation for pages cited. I learned a tremendous amount here, told with verve and efficiency. I wished for more interviews, such as with his expert witness who discounts the standard version told in the West about Tiananmen Square. However, I wanted more follow-through with this episode, given the surprising claims made by journalist Jan Wong.

Parfitt takes a refreshing if idiosyncratic approach to many sights and characters; that is, he likes to second-guess and counter-argue against the received wisdom of a peaceful Tibet, a massive protest at Tiananmen Square that was shot down in its thousands, of a Great Wall, of the Terracotta Warriors, of the Boxer Rebellion, the Opium Wars, or the reasons Taiwan and China became estranged. He visits museums to panda breeding, suspiciously related triumphs, and Japanese WWII vivisection. He relates fluently the sagas of Sun Yat-Sen, Mao, Chiang Kai-Shek, and lesser-known figures in context, as he visits their birthplaces and monuments. He rummages through rumors. He corrects distortions of the historical record, whether from the Dalai Lama, the Cultural Revolution, germ warfare by the Japanese, the Korean War, the rape of Nanking, and many more horrors, it seems, rather than wonders.

Even China's beauty spots drag. Hordes keep visiting Hangzhou's West Lake to marvel at it because it's marketed as a marvel. It reminded me of Don DeLillo's novel "White Noise" with a scene set at the "most photographed barn in America."

After a while, this assault on his senses wears Parfitt out. He circles the north, up to Haiban in Manchuria and then, dashing across even the North Korean border for a tense moment, down the coast's cities. Mostly, he goes from megalopolis to metropolis by train, so you see less of the countryside. Although what he tells from nearer the Burmese border or in his excursions away from a series of endlessly oppressive urbanized monstrosities remains noteworthy if for rare moments of sanity among the relative peace, for a few minutes or miles. The pressure grows, until by the noose of his northern loop, he's given up his goal of a third journey inland to the western realms, along the old Silk Road. This decision comes suddenly, told in one paragraph.

Therefore, it surprised and saddened me. I admire Colin Thubron's reports from the Silk Road and Tibet, so I wished Parfitt had taken this third route. He cites, speaking of Tibet, Ma Jian's iconoclastic stories in "Stick Out Your Tongue" and his 1983 bohemian frontier trek in "Red Dust." Along with these, Parfitt's book inspired me to check out the day after I finished it an existential quest into the south, "Soul Mountain," inspired by Nobel laureate Gao Xingjiang's 1983 trek-- as well as Thubron's 1987 travelogue "Behind the Wall." So, enlightened by Parfitt, you can see the sign of a good book: it made me eager to find out more.

However, Parfitt's alternative makes sense. He's weary of PRC hassles. The last third of his book takes us around the coast of Taiwan. That allows him to compare and contrast the island nation of his past ten years  with its giant neighbor. He finds that while Taiwan's friendlier and more tolerant, it inherits its counterpart's Confucian obfuscation and desire for revenge. The ubiquity of women of all ages sporting Playboy fashions cluelessly, of everyone donning logos of Che, marijuana leaves (they think it's the Canadian maple leaf), and the proliferation of Hello Kitty symbolizes another sort of myopia: "a mindless kitty-cat that has no mouth and consequently no voice." (325) Silliness and schmaltz stand for the Republic of China, reduced and rejected, but still claiming sovereignty over more territory than the PRC.

Taiwan also possesses a frightening penchant for mayhem: all televised whether architectural, political, criminal, judicial, or recreational. A treacherous highway posts signs that warn the traveler to hurry as rocks fall, as if hastening will thwart landslides. The educational system resembles institutionalized child abuse. Its workers match Japan with average hours (72) weekly. Incessant, raucous, inane, despite its own advancements (credit hated Japanese colonizers, KMT capital after the army and refugees fled their defeat, and American aid), Taiwan remains "as close as lips to teeth" with the PRC, as he adapts a saying.

Now returned to teach in the comparative tranquility of New Brunswick, Parfitt realizes he has freed himself from a paternalistic, haughty, rote, and collectively imposed culture. In China, he will not gain full immersion. He knows Mandarin, but he questions authority. China demands myth as an "imperative," given "such a sorrowful, tumultuous, and inglorious past." (393) He values truth, he suspects myth.

His last chapter recounts his Chinese students in Canada doggedly defending their native government's crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square twenty years earlier. His charges remain docile, speaking up not only for Mao but for Stalin. The Chinese woman running the Confucius Institute in Parfitt's homeland admits that after three years there, she has no idea about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's news service, unable even to identify its initials. Mrs. Cai demands at the end of his interview that he hand over his notes to her so her boss can approve them before publication. He refuses.

(This review's cross-posted to Cafe Libri at Lunch.com 5-1-11; Amazon US 9-6-11. The book will appear Sept 15th 2011 and can be ordered from the author's website or Amazon; I reviewed an advance galley. As of 5-21-11, I've posted reviews on Amazon US & Lunch.com of "Soul Mountain," "Red Dust," the related "Stick Out Your Tongue," and "Behind the Wall." These appeared in due time on this blog...)

My interview / review: Elf Power

I had the chance last autumn, on the release of their eponymously titled tenth record, to interview by e-mail Andrew Rieger, singer-songwriter from Elf Power. From R.E.M.'s hometown of Athens, Georgia, where Carolina native Rieger was inspired to attend college so as to be nearer that band. Along with R.E.M., Elf Power (I hear a lot of early Eno crossed with psychedelic textures and folk-rock, a winning combination) remains one of my favorite bands since I heard their eclectic, medievally tinged, feedback-laden, distorted pastoral, Southern gothic drone. Enough adjectives?

Find out more below, and via the links herein. Wandering Through: My Interview with Elf Power
(Featured at PopMatters, 4-7-11)

I also reviewed their newest "Elf Power" album at Amazon US when it appeared...a reprise:

This grows on you. Insects, dirt, bones, ghosts haunt this disc, dedicated to the late Vic Chestnutt. Elf Power, by self-titling their tenth (!) album, appear to let the churning, restless sounds backing wistful, literary, and yearning lyrics sum up their ambitions. The modesty of this homemade album, full of whirring keyboards, efficient percussion, chiming guitars, and processed snippets, continues their recent direction.

That is, progressing from the medieval instrumentation of such as "When the Red King Comes," this shifts away from the dense, early-Eno feel of their work towards a more pastoral approach, from "Walking with the Beggar Boys" onward. While I favor their earlier albums for their daring swirl, they have matured gracefully into a more direct manner of delivering stories as sung and played. With no lyric sheet, you have to pay attention; the graceful thoughts come slowly through the speakers.

There are still hints of their more experimental period, as on the psychedelic riff of "Boots of Lead," or the hints of a waltz on "Little Black Holes." For a band that's been around Athens, Georgia so long, they still stock their songs with textures, even if not as immediately "out of time" as their earlier work showed. Part of the Elephant 6 collective, five members are backed by as many backing musicians. I'm not sure who plays what, as the album credits are sparse, but repeated listenings open up depth in what feels at first a pared-down delivery.

Early R.E.M.'s recalled on "Like a Cannonball," with its echoes and distortions, but most songs sway with a more straightforward musical backing of, as the album progresses, increasingly literary narratives in a few minutes each. "Spidereggs," "Ghost of John," and "The Concrete and the Walls" form a trilogy exploring the underside of life; "Tiny Insects" marvelously conjures up the mystery and oddity of their half-glimpsed realm as it intersects with ours. This sort of Southern Gothic's not macabre, but somehow life-affirming, perhaps part of the message of this audio response to the passing of Chestnutt, a collaborator.

Andrew Rieger sings these short songs, and his pleasant, but not carefree, tone recalls the Southern college-rock ambiance of twenty-five or more years ago in the mixture of a more popular style with a faintly British invasion, prog-psych, folk-rock, and art rock mixed influence. These blend well on this unassuming, but accomplished, album. Give this a chance to play a few times, and the tales tucked inside will begin to unfold. Good accompaniment for a restless night.

Band's website.

Imre Kertész' "Fiasco": Book Review

Returning to Budapest after three concentration camps, Imre Kertész wrote novels he knew would never be published under the Soviet regime. After he won the Nobel Prize in 2002, he mused how “I had the freedom to write as radically as I wanted, to go as deep inside as I wanted.” For, free of a market niche to fill in a democratic nation, he labored as a writer underground. The creation of Fiasco (also known as The Failure—the original title of ‘A kudarc’ in Magyar can mean also “the defeat, abortion, or throwback”—all five definitions fit) follows the two novels which earned him acclaim.

The first, Fatelessness (1975: [my review]), deals with his time in the camps. Its title reveals the existential tone of his account, shorn of sentiment or humanist piety. Its teenaged protagonist watches brutality and rationality combine through German efficiency and mass cruelty. What I liked about this work was its refusal to become manipulative. Granted, Kertész refuses to pander to easy emotion here, and that may put off readers looking for a humanizing, life-affirming or message-laden story.

As with Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990), the next work in what is now regarded as a trilogy, I doubt that much is fictionalized here; these novels remain too fragmented and disjointed to unfold as seamless works of art. Kaddish deals in a messy way with the narrator’s refusal to bring a child into this world. 

What Fiasco adds to Kertész’ daunting reputation may surprise those expecting another Holocaust-related story. The title, as before, promises a serious theme, but deadpan Kafkaesque humor lurks, captured well in Tim Wilkinson’s British-inflected but comparatively fluid translation from the novel originally published in 1988. Wilkinson repeats the weighty sentence style and agglutinative word structures of Hungarian without making it too leaden. However, this remains as heavy a novel as his other two in this series, and offers no light read. 

Based on his own life, Kertész begins by confronting his fate. His narrator has come back from the camps—the death factory witnessed as “a kind of student jape”-- so he must write what he knows, about the subject nobody else wants to read. He sits next to a filing cabinet, typing in a dismal flat underneath the beast tenant he calls Oglütz, “the unsilent being” who stomps above him as “a female being who fed on noise.” The narrator, only referred to as “the old boy,” shoves earplugs in against her sonic assaults. He tries to write another novel that nobody will read, any more than they did his previous one about his experiences—honestly told, but the problem is that he cannot tell his readers, if any, or himself, of a false happiness. 

“Auschwitz was present here, sitting inside me as an undigested dumpling, its spices belching up at the most unexpected moments.” This metaphor registers Kertész’ matter-of-fact tone. His protagonist “the old boy” struggles to escape its shadow:  “In place of exemplary death, the facts can only serve up mountains of corpses.” From its impact, he tries to extricate himself from the wreckage, but art offers few consolations. “I was taken to Auschwitz not by the train in the novel but by a real one.” He has returned to a daytime existence after the war less immediately punitive, but just as soul-destroying. 

He begins another novel, and its contents comprise two-thirds of Fiasco.  György Köves finds himself in a land without a name, as featureless as any totalitarian city. Long sentences often delayed from ending by one parenthetical interruption after another mirror Köves’ anxiety. 

His story follows his attempts after he returns home “from abroad” to navigate a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. He begins as a foreigner, as if waking after being haunted. Into a grim city of light, guided by a beam, he works as a journalist and then, after he is fired, as a machine-fitter unfit for such employment, before he or his alter ego has been conscripted into the military as a prison guard. Meanwhile, as fictional layers increase, Köves keeps writing his own fables, and he hears those of his colleagues who invent their own stories to share. 

This saga takes up hundreds of pages. Often, little happens within the laconic expenditure of narrative energy in rendering such a series of unfortunate events. Moments more alive flit by, in a restaurant or the workplace, as Kertész indulges in quick character studies of Köves’ comrades or his lovers, but these caricatures, with passing glimpses of welcome satire, do not linger long. 

Köves cannot control his destiny. The plot resembles “a recurrent nightmare” and only “by gambling away one’s hopes” does any practical aim for Köves appear to be fulfilled, however briefly. In a “restless, half-slumbering state,” he wanders in a system where each citizen must decide what to do. As a functionary explains: “Here they merely give you the opportunity, and then what they do in the room is take cognizance of your decision.” 

His department head, during Köves’ lurch back into journalism (such sudden shifts prove common) tries to articulate the reason the system works as it does. All are servants of “a higher conceptualization,” moving towards an “unbroken perfectionism.” This consists of the system “trying ceaselessly to put people to the test.” In this “power game,” Köves surrenders. He loses track of who’s manipulating who. He fails his lovers. His stints at the local watering hole, The South Seas, offer little escape from tedium. 

“I can only write the novel that it is given me to write,” he tells his colleague after a sudden march under banners “WE WANT TO LIVE!” fills the streets for a moment. He must stay in this city even if as others go abroad to find what they cannot in their unnamed homeland. In the “Slough of Deceit,” both writers, the “old boy” and Köves, accept their fate, that of a writer of unhappy stories as their honest, only ones.  

It’s difficult to read so much about such an enervating existence. Kertész in this allegorical-autobiographical tale far exceeds the incomplete fictions of Kafka. While Köves in his adventures tries to elude the “vague apparition which resembled the drowning man haunting his dreams,” by the end, after three-hundred and sixty pages of dense narration, the reader may understand why Köves and Kertész appear to merge. 

The tale of a writer writing a novel about a writer writing a novel full of stories about shifting identities is a hallmark of postmodernism. Kertész produces a well-crafted work, but it does convey the bleakness of his nation and the era that produced him and his subject, exactly as he convinces himself what the outcome had to be. Whether Kertész captures better the feeling of being trapped by this regime, or his refusal to capitulate to its demands, remains typically ambiguous. As an existentialist writer determined to stare down his fate, he endures. 

Fiasco concludes by slipping into the protagonist’s stoicism faced in the form of “the sweet memory of his fiasco.” For, after his novel has been accepted for publication, the writer takes in his pocket back to his flat a paperweight of grey stone. He places it atop a filing cabinet.  Köves contemplates how the great boulder pushed by Sisyphus must eventually wear down, into such a rock that can be carried in a weary hand as one returns home, again to write what he must .(Featured on 4-5-11 at New York Journal of Books.com)

Note from Amazon on the author: 

IMRE KERTÉSZ was born in Budapest in 1929. At age fifteen he was deported to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, and finally to a subcamp at Zeitz, to labor in a factory where Nazi scientists were trying to convert coal into motor fuel. Upon liberation in 1945 he worked as a journalist before being fired for not adhering to the Communist party doctrine. After a brief service in the Hungarian Army, he devoted himself to writing, although as a dissident he was forced to live under Spartan circumstances. Nonetheless he stayed in Hungary after the failed 1956 uprising, continuing to write plays and fiction in near-anonymity and supporting himself by translating from the German writers such as Joseph Roth, Freud, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. He remained little-known until 1975, when he published his first book, Fatelesseness, a novel about a teenage boy sent to a concentration camp. It became the first book of a trilogy that eventually included The Failure and Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Subsequent titles include Liquidation, The Pathseeker, Union Jack, and, a memoir, The File on K. In 2002, Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Budapest and Berlin.

The Black Watch's "Led Zeppelin Five": Music Review

                                

On many small labels, since 1987, John Andrew Fredrick and his band craft gritty power-pop. On their eleventh full-length album, The Black Watch features what Fredrick, a professor of English, creates with edgily erudite lyrics and a stoic, determined vocal delivery. While his voice recalls Ian McCulloch’s deep, steady tone, his guitar style for me does not hearken back to The Church or the Go-Betweens (frequent comparisons) so much as Scott Miller’s intricate, brainy tunes for Game Theory and The Loud Family.

Miller and Fredrick led California, college-town indie rock ensembles starting in the 1980s. They both remained the leaders, singer-songwriters, and only constant members. Both construct energetic, shifting rock musical templates that they can’t help but tinker with, dismantle, spin about, and rebuild. Fredrick prefers a less quirky approach, however. He sticks on Led Zeppelin Five, despite its cheeky title, to a more serious, less self-consciously clever tone than Miller
in both vocal pitch and guitar-based melody.

This album improves with repeated listening. At first, these somewhat dour, if oddly peppy, songs may sound too similar. They begin to open up as their riffs burrow down in your memory. Fredrick applies his songwriting in a slightly oblique strategy, taking the college-rock styles of the New Wave and post-punk eras while striving to stamp his composed personality upon this solid design.

“Oscillating” starts off the album, menacing by a spare electric guitar, with Fredrick’s voice sounding more like “isolating” as he repeats the word over and over.  “How Much About Love” begins more softly.   It boosts the dynamic into a familiar shift into a danceable but confident heft as the band joins in.

Guitarist Steven Schayer (brother of Bad Religion’s drummer, also ex-Chills in their later stages) with ex-Velouria drummer Rick Woodard and bassist Scott Taylor provide the range Fredrick needs to convey his songs (most of which he takes sole credit for) as accessible to indie-rock fans looking for literate pop-rock. The decline of indie rock stores and stations oriented towards the music of Fredrick’s generation leaves many listeners playing the same old records from 1967 or 1978. It’s a pleasure to hear a record released which compliments these earlier sounds without pandering to them.

For “Emily, Are You Sleeping?” a drier vocal mix continues the guitar-pop with another increase in volume. These first songs recall 1980s power-pop but they do not imitate it. Similarly, “Like in the Movies” takes inspiration from The Smiths through a laconic, if harmony-laden, mid-tempo approach.

“Cognate Objects” floors the distortion pedal, a welcome move for a band often associated with softer, jangly tunes. A catchy riff means this song stands out. Given the title, “Earl Grey Tea” returns to the Anglophile roots which enrich Fredrick’s words and music. This song strives for the energy of the previous half of the album, but it prefers a straightforward, less ornamented performance. At its end, strummed and picked snippets of “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” by The Byrds waft past.

This deft blend of British and American flavors defines The Black Watch. The enigmatically titled “The Maid’s Been Round” takes another song reminiscent of The Smiths but slows down the speed. While less lively and slightly less engaging, the lyric “I thought I’d drink away some pain” fits the track neatly.

The Hoboken, N.J., mood of Yo La Tengo and The Feelies simmers into “Only Lasted”; “The Stars in the Sky” as with its title feels slightly methodical, more stiffly conveyed than earlier songs. The second half of the album slows by the seventh, eighth, and ninth tracks. This attests to Scott Campbell’s production and the band’s sense that these may be the places suited for its less swirling, more ringing, polite pop songs. These are respectable, but they represent a leveling off of the album’s previous momentum.

I prefer the louder, aggressive styles which show off the guitar textures and songwriting byways better. “Kinda Sorta” turns this album’s triumph. It meanders but does not wander, recalling again Scott Miller’s parallel trajectory (or that of The Soft Boys), with a frenetic saunter through off-kilter, trippier, neo-psychedelic explorations.

Fittingly, the album closes with a “hidden track” as “Weirdly,” which turns out as far as I can tell to be a  cover of “It’s All too Much” by The Beatles. As with “Kinda Sorta,” this shows off the band’s more lysergic tones with panache, and at seven minutes, it manages to pay tribute to this familiar song without tiring the listener. It compares well also to the cover of this same song by The Church, while keeping it in step with the rest of this smart, ambitious, and satisfying album.

For musicians recording, at least for Fredrick, almost a quarter-century, this album on his own label left me wondering. Not about the band’s abilities, but about the band’s obscurity. With trendier musicians around the band’s base near the Echo Park-Silverlake-Los Feliz neighborhoods of Los Angeles acclaimed for far more derivative styles, the fact that this album appears on Fredrick’s own label registers their neglect by the mainstream. Perhaps this offers them freedom to perfect their sensible sound, as neither Scots pipers nor a swan song. The Black Watch merits acclaim for such a strong album, far into their career. At its best, it displays an enviable command of loud, crunchy guitar-based pop-rock, not too sweet, not too sour.


(Featured at PopMatters 4-22-11; slightly edited here for Amazon US 4-21-11 & Lunch.com 4-25.)

Rob Young's "Electric Eden": Book Review

What Becomes of the Oaken Hearted? Rob Young’s quest spans the last century’s search for pastoral evocations and folk recreations of a British quest to summon its lingering “ghost memories”. Over 600 pages, narrated with verve and ease, this editor at The Wire music magazine conjures up the contradictions of sound technology harnessed to rural moods, and an urban audience longing for antiquarian lore. In a nation built along Roman roads, the lure of open space limits the adventurer. In a land so long civilized among landscapes tamed, modern freedom seekers turn to the imaginary tale, the mythological ritual as liberating paths. For the British listener, nostalgia and fulfillment lurk in a golden age before machines, yet one which plugs into electricity, and exotic instruments and moods, to convey a retelling of the elusive past.

He begins with the “inward exodus” by singer Vashti Bunyan, whose 1968-69 trek away from London by horse-drawn caravan up finally into Gaelic-speaking Scotland symbolizes this era’s idealism. Young’s discography lengthens as hippies crowd out folksingers; Bunyan’s search brings her to Donovan, producer Joe Boyd, and his clients The Incredible String Band, who epitomize the fashions and styles she imagined but did not know. In “the dual landscape/ dreamscape of Britain’s interior”, rock met and blurred and blended with folk.

The preliminary section, “Music from Neverland”, efficiently explains the contexts for this Aquarian Age. Young charts the contributions of Cecil Sharp and Francis Child as song and ballad and dance collectors. Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams enriched classical forms with folk melodies drawn from the last remnants of the oral tradition, its untutored composers from the peasantry. Invented characters as composer Peter Warlock and bard Ewan MacColl enliven this stage. Tension arises between music of a people as Child and Sharp had compiled vs. music from the people as favored by interpreters of the proletariat, often Marxist and radical themselves, in the industrial, trade-unionized post-WWII decades.

This period ends as Bob Dylan enters. He preferred his own words to those in archives, field recordings, or transcribed lyrics. This Americanized approach clashed with MacColl’s class-conscious fidelity to the oral tradition. By the end of 1962, when Dylan visited England’s folkies, revolution looms. But, unlike the uprising predicted by 60 years of diligent researchers, leftist agitators, and earnest re-creators, British Eden would be electrified. The cultural rebellion “would take place not on the streets, but in the head.”

Dylan met fellow guitarist-singer Martin Carthy. Carthy’s renditions of “Lord Franklin” and “Scarborough Fair” impressed Dylan so much that he reworked them for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, as “Bob Dylan’s Dream” and “Girl from the North Country”.  In 1965, Simon & Garfunkel, after learning the song from Carthy, copyrighted their version (with no credit to Carthy) of what had been a tune nobody had taken credit for authoring, “Scarborough Fair”. Such American ambitions, clashing with the anonymity in which many folksongs had been passed down, reworked, and tinkered with, edged many British singers and songwriters away from jazz and the blues into a more indigenous, yet eclectic, compositional style.

As Dylan and the British Invasion emerged, beatniks returned from abroad with a North African oud or Balkan bouzouki. The DADGAD tuning of Davy Graham’s guitar, the modal music of Bert Jansch, and the coffeehouse stylings incorporating electrification entered folk. Early Music masters David Munrow and Christopher Hogwood revived old instruments that enriched what had been sparer tunes often passed down a capella. While “pop” derives from mass spectacles manufactured for the Roman urban populi, Young reminds us, volk derives from the Germanic peasantry, villagers and vagrants bearing songs from the wood, the forest, the barbaric heath where rituals endured and perplexed their heirs.

Shirley Collins defines for Young the essence of “an ideal folk voice, sounding as though it was grappling with the words for the very first time, and yet equally as though it was so inured to the pain and suffering so often portrayed in the songs that it had insulated itself from them”. Symbolically, Collins no longer worked with American folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax by the Summer of Love. Her new producer, via Elektra Records, arrived to run London’s UFO club. During 1967, Joe Boyd hosted Pink Floyd (producing their “Arnold Layne” single) and lysergic luminaries, accompanied by acid-rock lightshows. Nearby if not always blended into this heady milieu, folk-rock fermented.

Boyd had already produced The Incredible String Band. He continued with Fairport Convention, as jazz, jug-band, and rock-schooled rhythm sections joined with a sprightly sets of singers and guitarists. For Pentangle, their “aerated play of light” fragmented into “a sonic mirage” with “a curly line between a courtly medievalism and the enlightened foolery of Haight-Ashbury”.  Vocalist Jacqui McShee, acoustic guitarists Jansch and John Renbourn created above Danny Thompson’s string bass and Terry Cox’s brushed drums a typical tune which patters “like butterflies trapped in a balsa-wood box”.

Boyd’s Fairport played their first gig in May 1967 and two months later opened for Pink Floyd at UFO, before cutting the first of four increasingly daring records. They often covered Dylan and followed an eerie parallel. After Dylan’s motorcycle accident required The Band to retreat to Big Pink and regroup as a rooted ensemble, so Fairport faced a fatal van crash. Survivors recouped to refine their sound.

They departed from their genial West Coast harmonies. “A Sailor’s Life” from Unhalfbricking featured the first recorded use of sticks with drums to back up a folk tune. Dave Mattacks earned percussive credits on countless sessions. His “funky plod” provided “the ideal foil for the mushy instrumental palette of English electric folk, propelling its accordions, fiddles, abrasive guitars and astringent harmonies forward without denying their bulk and grit”.

Liege and Lief, under the influence of venerable folk interpreter A. L. “Bert” Lloyd, transferred the century’s leftist, proletariat, song tradition to the flower children. While Pentangle’s members grew up with folk transmitted on the BBC and taught in classrooms, Fairport matured with skiffle and Elvis. Richard Thompson’s and Simon Nicol fuzzed their guitars, over Sandy Denny’s ethereal voice, Dave Swarbrick’s slashing fiddle and Ashley Hutchings’ thumping bass guitar. Fairport, at the center of this book and this tale, epitomized the late-60s evolution.

These musicians fueled the next decade of folk-rock. But their heyday rushed by. Advertising copy for 1969s Liege promoted it as “documenting a (very brief) era”. Even during “A Sailor’s Life”, Young asserts that Denny tired of folk’s limits; she went solo after Liege. Young explains her neediness and her search for companionship as she pursued a singer-songwriter pop-folk muse whose comforts eluded her.

Hutchings also left then, hastening backwards to ‘70s sonic fidelity, if that makes sense for his leadership—in its first and boldest two of many incarnations—of a plugged-in Steeleye Span, grounded in archived ballads and decked in burnished apparel.  Their first two albums “are textured with a loamy, atavistic grit.” Tellingly, while Mattacks played on their debut, their follow-up left out drums but added Martin Carthy’s power chords distorted across a “massive Fender amplifier”, to mesmerizing and exhilarating effect on Please to See the King. But, the fireworks dimmed. Hutchings left to revive with his new wife Shirley Collins and then The Albion Band an “English country music” reviving Morris dance and performance, delivered in acoustic intimacy as intricately plotted and researched presentations.

Another of Boyd’s protégés, Nick Drake, shared this gentler, erudite approach. Young takes us, as with Denny, cautiously along as we watch the demise of another talented troubadour, soon reduced to a “withdrawn, solipsistic, shrunken seer”.  John Martyn’s existential pain earns a chapter, as his Echoplexed guitar, full of distortion, adapts free-jazz and dub techniques to his “boiling electric lyre”.

West Coast psychedelia celebrated summer meadows, but for the British, this could be a brief picnic. “When Joni Mitchell sang of getting back to the garden, you felt she pictured a lot of naked longhairs disporting themselves in love games off the coast of Big Sur. For Brits, the image that springs to mind is a cheeky reefer in the potting shed before getting back to work on the allotment”.

The period 1967-71 earns the most entries in the appended discography arranged by timeline. Its highlights, as with Pentangle, Fairport, and Steeleye, flickered and flared rapidly. Pioneers of folk-rock expansion, Boyd’s first clients The Incredible String Band, concocted a “global village” world music sustaining an ecumenical if acid-driven vision quest. But their records, for all their “very cellular” song structures and shape-shifting scope, could not sustain a career, given the heady vistas and drug-driven nature of their ambitions. After the bonfires collapse, as Young asks: “What becomes of the oaken-hearted?”

The book’s cover shows a semi-acoustic band, Heron, in a Berkshire field the summer of 1970. A piano nestles in a meadow, as pastel-shirted, long-haired musicians sit and play. Pye Records miked them to “capture the ambiance of the great outdoors.”  Booms surround them. This depicts an “electric Eden” created by an idealistic, disenchanted middle-class whose dreams and (lack of) ambitions mirrored Withnail & I, Bruce Robinson’s 1986 film of two unemployed actors fleeing to the Lake District in 1969.

Weariness pervades the songs of Drake and Martyn. Folk’s early-‘70s singer-songwriters woke to a comedown. Tiring of their past, Young argues, glam emerged with David Bowie and Marc Bolan as these gnomic performers reinvented themselves for the future, turning away from “warped Victoriana”. The riots of 1968 followed “Strawberry Fields” and an endless summer filled with “vertiginous trippiness and crooked-mirror Anglicana”. Mr. Fox, trained folk archivists and musicians, briefly kept the firmest hold on electric pastoralia that followed Steeleye and Fairport’s ascent. 

Fittingly, all three were guided by the enduring “Bert” Lloyd, whose book Folk Song in England (1967) was the first commission for Hipgnosis. They gave Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin “classic” rock album covers, while Young excels at explaining how urban-pastoral sepia tension seeps into artwork gracing Fairport’s Unhalfbricking, Sandy Denny’s The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, and the album Denny sang on, Led Zeppelin’s fourth.

A Shattering of the Rosy Lens

Magic and the supernatural beckoned bands away from confessional ballads towards often twee and fey attempts (Young possesses admirable patience as he sums up their efforts) to channel invented forces. Young pinpoints currents joining Wicca and folk as artificial energies. This does not diminish their organic power. “The Cruel Mother” may be sung with different lyrics by various voices, but she “will continue to be haunted by the guilt-inducing spectre of her child, because, whether sung by a Highland crofter, an acoustic duo in a folk club, an electric rock band at an outdoor festival or in a home studio with an electronic ambient backing track, the song itself is undead, a ghost that refuses to be forgotten”.

Festivals link neatly with Young’s survey of the British inheritance of the commons; unlike Greil Marcus’ over-determined Lipstick Traces, Young constructs his argument modestly and carefully. He shows how anti-authoritarian responses transmitted over the centuries persisted in debates over access to land. The ecologically-aware Glastonbury Fayre and its charity donations outlived the massive freak-outs which doomed the Isle of Wight’s festival. Disenchanted city dwellers tried to create, if for a weekend, alternative communities. New Age and environmental causes benefited greatly from cross-promotion.

Diminishing returns meant folk fans met with caricature, all bearded, clogged boffins with pewter flagons desperately seeking real ale. The ‘70s bring economic recession and political gloom; later chapters convey this strain in the realm. Arthurian and medievalist films flourished in the first half of the decade. The Wicker Man (the original version) still haunts with its imperious pagan revival. But, as Monty Python’s Camelot collapsed into stage sets of canvas and plywood, the English fascination with a manufactured soft-focus past ended.

Musically and culturally, the rise to prominence lasted only a few years. After 1972, Steeleye Span in another incarnation had, as with similarly successful musicians, outgrown the small folk music circuit. They opted for glossier, amplified stadium rock, while Richard and Linda Thompson spent the decade struggling “with a sense of hard-won knowledge, a literal dis-illusionment, a shattering of the rosy lens. It was as if the music permitted a wallowing in an imaginative world of filth from which Sufism might elevate and insulate them”. The String Band departed for Scientology, while Young passes over intriguingly if quickly such micro-genres as the Jesus People’s incorporations of operatic or mystical folk.

Young delves into the underground, but when its musicians emerge to Top 40 success, they fade from view. As a boy, I first heard Sandy Denny as a guest on “The Battle of Evermore” on Led Zeppelin’s new, fourth LP. I discovered via a dim recollection of Denny her folk-rock lineage much later. I imagine for fans of Ireland’s Horslips (mentioned once), Scotland’s Runrig, or England’s The Oyster Band (both unmentioned) as these bands merged traditional folk into louder rock, the impulses to track back to British “visionary music” trickled down from the top of the charts rather than up through cult releases.

Similar shortcomings arise when The Kinks get one sentence for the title track from 1968’s concept album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. Surely this LP encapsulates the sylvan chronicling and macabre components of British invention that define Young’s project. Jethro Tull’s “kitchen prose and gutter rhymes” may earn contempt from folk purists, but their ditties opened ears to search out venerable melodies. Pink Floyd explored experimental pastoral electronics in their later-‘60s and early-‘70s albums, but Young understates their popular impact.

In this massive compendium, I found some slips. Donovan’s songs here and there are jumbled as to what appeared where. “A twelfth-century Saxon church” is a misnomer. Robert O’Flaherty’s documentary Man of Aran filmed fishermen off an Irish rather than a Scottish island. Marshall McLuhan, while he taught for a time in the US, should be identified as Canadian rather than American.  Irish-born Chicago police chief Francis O’Neill’s Music of Ireland “bible” contains 1,850 pieces of music but it was not published in 1850. It debuted in 1903. Young’s black-and-white illustrations (at least in the proof copy) often strain the eye; many telling details reduce to thumbnail-sized reproductions of LP covers.

One album cover for Young depicts the downward spiral of ‘70s folk-rock. Steeleye Span’s fortunes crashed in the year punk hit, 1976. Their Rocket Cottage in free fall (its hideous art as fatal portent) frames a quirky semi-fictionalized chapter where Young allows a skewed sensibility freer rein. Diminishing returns meant folk fans met with caricature, all bearded, clogged boffins with pewter flagons desperately seeking real ale. While Young ignores Robyn Hitchcock, who with and after The Soft Boys applied hallucinogenic, hyper-natural lyrics to rambling folk tunes wired with new-wave vibrations, he does champion admirably another survivor of these end of the ‘70s mash-ups, Julian Cope.

Cope’s The Modern Antiquarian gazetteer near the millennium surveys his native landscape aligned with soundscapes of “attritional and introspective rock.” Young tells how “Cope sings, speaks and writes in the voice of the heathen—the aboriginal ‘people of the heath’ who worshipped the earth as a mother goddess”. In this “alternative, humane heritage movement”, room for the dissenter must be built: “no poetry without heretics”. Cope and his monumental concerns seek to separate the pagan substrata from the non-Christian detritus. Delightful as the hobby-horse set can be, cobbling together patchworks of tunes and dress, Cope seeks what he hears as “mysterious and tortuous” beneath these motley fabrics.

Kate Bush floats past steampunk, David Sylvain into alchemy, while Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis finds solitude. Their connections appear tenuous. For all I know The Skids and Big Country merited worthy analysis. What goes missing is in-depth discussion of contemporary electric folk. Young never cites Britta Sweers’ 2005 study. He neglects Gaelic-influenced bands. Scotland fades early, while Ireland earns diminishing returns, typified by the odd absence of Mark J. Prendergast’s 1990 history of its folk and rock, The Isle of Noises.  Nic Jones and June Tabor, John Tams and Home Service, Fairport’s Cropredy reunions, fanzines and the Net, the Free Reed label, the revival of English dance bands: such topics may or may not earn but a sentence. Inclusions of bands and musicians add often only lists of names.

Later chapters, reflecting instead Young’s own tastes rather than providing a comprehensive survey of post-‘70s trends, may appeal to fans lured here by personalities from the video era. The sounds do not linger as long on the page, and readers who aren’t listeners may struggle to figure out the sonic appeal of the poetic songwriters profiled. Young displays the private, personal evolution of a few malcontents, as they drift away from the new-wave charts and MTV publicity to burrow into uneasy moods. These tunes seem to resist Young’s capture in print. The tradition of backwards sight as a forward direction for cultural and musical progression among these self-marginalized seers endures.

Martyn Bates exemplifies this complex contemporary stance, inheriting the legacy of those with whom this narrative commenced. After singing in the post-punk duo Eyeless in Gaza—which included avant-folk—he released in 1994 Murder Ballads (Drift). He paired with Mick Harris, drummer for thrash-metal exponents Napalm Death. Harris and Bates sought, as had earlier hippies and folksingers, a quieter if no less disturbing way to conjure darker tones. Bates later worked with Max Eastley, cohort of Pentangle’s John Renbourn and of Donovan. And, with the latter paisley pop star, we return to the destination Vashti Bunyan sought. Donovan had opened up his land bought in the Isle of Skye for artists and musicians to settle. By the time Bunyan reached Skye, traipsing north across Britain by horse-drawn caravan, a year and a half had passed. Donovan had long left what was now his half-deserted fiefdom, for Los Angeles.

Young concludes with a sobering message. Misfits and a few progressives still gravitate towards the volatility of unconventional folk. Its dream of rural self-sufficiency, for an overpopulated and suburbanized island nation, cannot sustain itself. Wilderness shrinks. Sixty million Britons may long for their national symbol, their own enclosed garden. Yet this collective dream must endure. Young proclaims that “to preserve the sense of enchantment with British landscape that is hard-wired into the nation’s psyche it will become even more important to screen out modernity, to not quite see what is actually there, but to distort through the antiquarian eye and the mental scrying glass”.

This enchanting and engaging, if uneven, contribution to cultural musical history deserves to grow dog-eared. It will be opened by a contemporary reader turned informed listener, rather than shut up by an antiquarian.

(PopMatters featured April 21, 2011; in shorter and altered form on Amazon US & Lunch.com)

Kevin Holohan's "The Brothers' Lot": Book Review

Promoted as a comic satire but often an ironic fable, Holohan’s debut excoriates the Catholic-run schools in a vaguely postwar Dublin. As a graduate of the Irish Christian Brothers’ schools there, he incorporates his own memories into the imagined re-creations of the abuse, mayhem, and foibles which characterized Irish education for most working-class boys. The Brothers, as the congregation is known in Ireland, have dwindled after their sometimes sadistic role in “industrial schools” as reformatories has become exposed in recent decades. But, as Kevin Holohan and his imaginary characters never forget, nobody in his novel’s ignorant of the fate meted out to miscreants who report on their abusers. He embeds parallels to the real-life girls who, after delivering their illegitimate babies, find themselves referred to as numbers instead of names in the Magdelene laundries, here "Jezebel's" workhouses for “Fallen Mothers”.


Such slightly exaggerated parallels speckle this story. For those familiar with Ireland, the novel’s allusions to its famine and its civil wars, alongside geographical and cultural referents, deepen with context. A playful yet wry tone resembles the satirist Flann O’Brien, as when a Fr. Mulvey, S.J. rides his bicycle into the plot. The industrial school lurks in Drumgloom; the Jezebel’s run by the Sisters of Forebearance near Dullow. Bishops of Dervish and Ossory, Cloynes and Bardgey, and Spokes and Duggery, or the place Knockpaltry-on-Fergus, sound plausible. Drimnagh’s orphanage run by the Oblates of the Impervious Heart of Herod reaches Monty Python’s heights of nomenclatural application.

This shift in names dominates the narrative. It enlivens its wit while sharpening its critique. Holohan strives to balance humor and dismay and The Brothers' Lot shows his skill. As Paul Murray in his 2010 novel [see my review] Skippy Dies did for today’s Irish secondary Catholic schools, struggling after scandals and secularism to survive as vocations dwindle and lay-teachers dominate the faculty, so Holohan does for the recent past. But then, legions of Brothers tyrannized the lot of those consigned to their care.

“Lot” in the novel works three ways. Builders seek to take over the “lot” which for the Brothers of Godly Coercion’s School for Young Boys of Meager Means has supported a towering but ramshackle edifice for a century, founded to educate the humbler students for what one teacher predicts as “the lowest levels of the Civil Service or the Electricity Supply Board or the rare Gaelic football prodigy who might get slid into a sinecure at the bank”. Its North Dublin location represents a humbler status compared to the schools for the upper classes, as their rival visitor, a Jesuit superior, conveys in his tone, “with the assurance of one accustomed to never needing the imperative mode to have his bidding done”.

The “lot” of these lowly Brothers does not escape sympathy. They come from rural backgrounds, and they are tasked with trying to re-Gaelicize with football and leather straps a rabble of Dublin lads who resist their every dull lesson. The Brothers themselves may be recruited, orphans, or all but press-ganged as teenagers, the second son or the eighth. In Ireland, these boys did not inherit the farm but could earn an education and a sort-of sinecure in a job-starved Ireland. But, sinecure means “without worry”, while these Brothers do fret. So much that with their charges and among themselves, they reveal their lack of learning, their fear at being found out as less than masterful.

They whip and beat into their pupils, their own sorry “lot”, these deadened recitals of Latin, Gaelic, or geography by rote, as they teach to the state curriculum and its own pointless tests. Holohan sends up the mangled French and Irish articulated by recalcitrant or dull-witted students, and as for the Latin, a few samples from the Hail Mary convey the lighter tone that enlivens what can be a serious story. “Et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus” transforms into a classroom chorus of “Ate Benny dicked us, fucked us, dangerous Twohey jaysus”. ”Ora pro nobis peccatoribus” translates as “Oh, rat, provo peck a Tory bus” .“Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae” turns “New kettle Nora, more tits no stray”.

But communal fear lashes out against such class-based frivolity, as the Brothers and (most of) their lay-teacher colleagues conspire to suppress any rebellion. This turns, as the novel’s course enters darker moods, into a rising death count and a massive cover-up. Symbolically, as the building begins to collapse, the novel depicts the doomed imposition of a sin-free school zone. “In the small shed Mr. Hourican was busy checking for sins of thought, deed, or omission, committed alone or with others, and on the far side of the yard stood Brother Walsh with what looked like a small pair of binoculars”.

Tally sticks must be worn by students; each sin earns a notch, with beatings accrued. No one is innocent, for no human equals Christ in perfection. Kafka’s penal colony may even stir within such episodes. “Yes and no had turned into equally wrong answers no matter what the question was”. This predicament hearkens back to the punishments inflicted on Irish-speaking students forced to learn English under the Crown: “for Irish people to use them on one another was vile and sickening in a deep, disturbing way,” comments the unseen narrator, filtered indirectly in Joycean manner here via Spud Murphy, one of the few lay-teachers who listens to his students. Holohan reserves his greatest contempt for the penalties and beatings meted out by lay-teachers, as they, unlike most of the Brothers, knew better: these teachers entered and left the schools to live each day out in the real world.

This dictated piety is constructed as the Brothers, and their opportunistic Diocesan Investigator of miracles, Fr. Mulvey, seize their chance to save the lot from demolition by builders. The Brothers seek to cash in with relics after a supposed miracle witnessed by one of their more mentally feeble members occurs on the crumbling site. They hasten to credit their Order’s founder, the Venerable Saorsach O’Rahilly, whom they wish to advance to sainthood.

The Venerable Saorsach’s life, commemorated on his death day yearly in a dreadful school pageant, earns its cameo. We watch as enacted by sullen students the story of his stereotypical life. We see his pious mother’s demise after her son runs off to sea and her bag of gold meant for the leprechauns to ransom him is stolen, Saorsach’s rejection of “harlots” dressed as third-year students in old kitchen rags which “would not have tempted the most starved lothario”, and finally his “dementia and death from something that very much resembled syphilis but was referred to as a ‘fever’”.

This endless ritual, Holohan’s omniscient narrator tells, “flapped its leaden wings on the first stage of its long flight toward lunchtime”. Often, the author opts for this elevated tone, which may seem either subtly overwritten in the style of too earnest a teller or intentionally pitched for the satirical mood which Flann O’Brien favored. “Around the whole school the desultoriness of last class gasped its way toward the final bell”. The radio news with its “quotidian normality clashed horribly with the laden silence oozing out of the oratory”.

Finally, the whole building nears its end. While this escapes the realistic bounds of what might be expected on a day class is still in session when the school's been falling apart, and fatally on top of some Brothers, Holohan describes the weighty scene: “Every weakness, every crack and fissure, every stress point and loose shingle had only to will itself and it could put an end to its sorry lot of bearing witness to the daily enactment of a vision twisted and thwarted that now blighted everyone and everything in its ambit”. Meanwhile, under the tension of the Brothers who scurry for proof of their miracle, an inspection team arrived to survey the curious situation, and the growing anarchy among the students, a “big blackout”, a mass refusal to cooperate, breaks out among the boys. “Every imaginable annoyance was brought to bear in one united front of provocation”.

The novel concludes with an island-wide rebellion as the very institutions give way and their lunatic keepers turn their own incarcerated, doomed victims within the walls they have erected to lock up sinners and somehow keep out sin from infecting themselves or the rest of Ireland. It’s a metaphorical end to the story which Holohan builds up as an indictment of the Irish nation’s cynical republicanism built on a corrosive clerical power and a crony-ridden leadership which refused to honor its own ideals.

Holohan shifts his narrative, from where I expected it to settle, on Finbar Sullivan, a boy newly arrived from Cork coming in to the school. Instead of a following a conventional way into the school, through a newcomer’s eyes, the novel refuses to settle. It roams from the Brothers, to Fr. Mulvey, to the parents and--more briefly-- the inspectors and builders and bureaucrats. The shifts in tone and indirect narration via the omniscient voice may surprise those looking for a lighthearted romp. This novel, using clever dialogue and outlandish names, disguises but does not deflect its serious intentions.

It may demand closer attention, and it may force the reader to examine how everyday complicity works to poison pure intentions. This refusal to stick with one perspective characterizes the author’s approach towards a sensitive subject. To address a topic as painful as clerical abuse abetted by state collusion and lay cowardice, he opts for passages of pain alternating with those of play. The novel grows grimmer as it continues, yet Holohan’s honesty forces him, as we who read it, to question our own participation and reactions to similar situations, however obliquely conveyed, that confront us.

Upon this ethical foundation for an entertaining tale, Holohan follows a satirical tradition which questions authority, undermines cliché, and upends the social order. Reading The Brother’s Lot, I thought not only of Flann O’Brien and Kafka but of another Dubliner, Jonathan Swift. He constructed his own moral tales inflating the small and deflating the large, while working at a splendid church across the Liffey River, on the nicer side of the city. Not far from where sometime late this past century, this school of Godly Coercion is said to have risen and fallen. (Posted in shorter, censored, rewritten form to Amazon US 4-5-11 & Lunch.com 4-21. As above featured in RePrint 4-11-11 at PopMatters.)

P.S. The school is set on "Greater Little Werburgh St"...After I wrote this, the author noted: "Here's a little allusive tidbit that you may know already - the real Werburgh Street is near Christchurch and Swi[ft] was born on nearby Hoey St and baptized on St Werburgh's Church on Werburgh Street."

Ceithre eile ó MoMA

Scríobh mé as Gaeilge faoi ceithre chéad chúid íomhannaí leannta agam i mó aiste riamh ar lá eile. Anois, bím ag insint agaibh faoi ceithre eile ar an Músaem na hEalaíne Nua-Aimseartha i Nua-Eabhrac. Is maith liom siadsa, ar ndóigh, den chéad scoth orm. 

Ar dtús,  chonaic mé saothar péintéireachta bréa le Amedeo Modigliani, "Lomhnocht a chlaonadh" (1921).  Bím súim dó de gháth. Mar sin, d'fhan mé ar aghaidh seo ar feadh tamaill. 

An dara ceann, rug mé ar fíor le Paul Klee,  "Cat agus Éan" (1928). Níl fhíos agam go leor de réir Klee. Ach, chuir sé fonn gáire orm. 

Agus a trí, fuair mé cosúlacht go hairithe le James Ensor,  "Dóláis Naomh Antoine"  (1887).  Go nádúrtha, tharraingt mé seo go díreach. I dtólamh, bím dúil ag foghlaim faoi radhairc domhain eile. 

Mar chríoch, chuir grianghraf seo as dom go mór.  Cheap Dorothea Lange "Mathair agus Leanbh" (1954) i gCathair Naomh Prionsias ar an tSráid Mhargadh. Má tá a fhios agat dom go han-mhaith, beidh tú a thuiscint cén fáth a bhí mé an léiriúchan.

(Feic anseo; tú ábalta a feicéail dhá ceithre ó MoMA mo chúid ar chéile as Béarla.) 

Another quartet from MoMA

I wrote in Irish about my first quartet of a share of favorite images before, the other day. Now, I'm telling you all about another four from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I was pleased by them, of course, as for me of the top quality. 

At the start, I saw a fine work of painting by Amedeo Modigliani, "Reclining Nude" (1921). I've had an interest in him habitually. Therefore, I stayed in front of this for a short while.

For the second one, I caught a likeness by Paul Klee, "Cat and Bird" (1928). I don't know much on account of Klee. But, I was amused at it.

And thirdly, I found this distinctive likeness by James Ensor, "Tribulations of Saint Anthony"  (1887). Naturally, I was drawn to this immediately. Always, I've had a desire to learn about views of the other world. 


Finally, this photograph moved me a lot. Dorothea Lange composed "Mother and Child" (1954) in the city of San Francisco on Market Street. If you know me very well, you will understand why I included this representation. 

(See here;  you're able to view my share of the two MoMA quartets together in English.)

Grianghraf/ Photo: Josef Koudelka, MoMA: "Ireland, 1972"