Kristin Anderson

David Kynaston
Austerity Britain: 1945-51
Bloomsbury, 2007
704 pages
£25.00
ISBN 978-0747579854

..

On 6 August 1945, it was Bank Holiday Monday.  Thirty-five extra trains had been added to Liverpool Street to make the London-to-seaside rounds and yet station queues still snaked around the block, 30,000 people were at the London Zoo and only 4,500 at the V&A, and 100,000 people tried to gain entry (only half managed) to an athletics meet at the White City stadium to see British pre-war champion Sydney Wooderson (who had stood in the corridor all night on the train down from Glasgow) best the Swedes.    Government officer Anthony Heap noted in his diary that the weather was changeable. “Obviously no day for Hampstead or anywhere like that…  So after an afternoon stroll round Bloomsbury and an early tea, hied us round to the Regent to see National Velvet” which he deemed enjoyable save that “the essential English atmosphere is missing.”

Yet despite holiday temptations, its usual audience of a quarter of the British adult population was tuned into the six o’clock Home Service broadcast, which on this particular day announced that an atomic bomb containing “as much explosive power as 2,000 of our great ten-tonners” had been dropped on the Japanese “army base” of Hiroshima, an “army base” that nevertheless boasted a population of over 300,000 inhabitants.  Writer Ursula Bloom looked at her husband across the room: “Horror filled us both, and to such a degree that for a moment neither of us could speak.”  Elizabeth Longford, from her Oxford home, recalled, “For the first time in my life I had a strong presentiment about the future: that a brilliant scientific discovery would bring a balance of evil to the human race.”  Joan Wyndham, at her Women’s Auxiliary Air Force base in Nottinghamshire, “felt the strangest mixture of elation and terror.”  Pub-goers cheered.  The Archbishop of Canterbury went into hiding – “a favourite posture of the Church in moments of moral crisis,” a Lambeth Palace chaplain noted wryly.  The Cabinet, which had not been informed of the bombing before its BBC debut, nevertheless assured anyone interested that no more would be used; Noël Coward thought that a bomb that would “blow us all to buggery” was “not a bad idea”.  And two days later, Henry St. John, a roaming salesman, tried to buy some cigarettes in Spennymoor but, finding none, instead contemplated masturbating over some pornographic inscriptions (“I fuck my sister—she’s 14”) on the door of a public loo.

Such alchemic blends of the seismic with the banal yield a diamond-sharp, rock-solid cornerstone for Austerity Britain, historian David Kynaston’s sparkling epic and inclusive account of the years between 1945 and 1951.  Comprising the first two books of a projected sequence entitled Tales of a New Jerusalem: 1945-1979, the series’ mission is to document the story of “ordinary citizens as well as ministers and mandarins, of consumers as well as producers, of the provinces as well as London, of the everyday as well as the monumental, […] of the Singing Postman as well as John Lennon.”  Kynaston accomplishes this in his first volume with a prose style that faultlessly balances entertainment with erudition and diverse historical assessment with gorgeous, fact-laden word pictures, all of which fuse together into an exemplary narrative of a fascinating period.

For starters, it is a marvel of structuring.  Austerity Britain locates mine-pits next to bed-sits and the East India Club alongside football clubs with heady and seemingly serendipitous insight.  Moreover, its gaze is exhaustive, dissecting with precision such sundry subjects as post-war marital trends, the legacy of 1942’s Beveridge report, cricket and racing preferences, the rise of Nye Bevan, the reception of David Lean’s Brief Encounters by working-class audiences (hearty guffaws), the decline of John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing, the fabrics available to seamstresses and the Liverpool race riots.  Kynaston’s sources are equally diverse, ranging from government publications to industry manuals, from unpublished journals to the ubiquitous Mass Observation diarists (although he is meticulous in acknowledging their middle-class biases).

These varied sources confirm a uniform conclusion: in post-war Britain, hope and exhaustion ran hand in hand, and the contrast between expectations and reality was stark.  As Kynaston reiterates, the end of the war did not guarantee a return to pre-war standards.  Rather, waits lengthened, clothes continued fraying, power-saving blackouts were intermittently mandated and food rationing tightened.  Recalling a downsize in the week’s allocation, one housewife records that, “Our rations now are 1oz bacon per week – 3lb potatoes – 2oz butter – 3oz marge – 1oz cooking fat – 2oz cheese and one shilling meat,” still an improvement upon the periods with neither meat nor cheese available at all.  Eggs were rare, sometimes found in powdered form, sometimes absent altogether.   With coal, gas and petrol in sharp demand, heating and electricity were expensive and monitored, which in turn led to stratospheric tax increases on newly-purchased automobiles.  More controversial was the cancellation of many night-time athletic events (dog races, football games), a deprivation in no way assuaged by the discomforts of reaching such entertainments via train carriages freshly stripped of their insulation and light fixtures by enterprising black marketeers.

Moreover, in January 1947, Britain’s severest winter weather of the twentieth century hit just as a coal shortage filtered down.  “Three days later, the coldest day for more than 50 years, the lights went out not only in London but all over the country; the electricity was off for long spells; gas in most big cities was at about a quarter of its normal pressure; and amid huge snow-drifts transport virtually ground to a halt,” Kynaston describes.  Novelist Christopher Isherwood, on a rare visit back from America, summarised it thus: “Two or three of my friends said to me then: ‘Believe us, this is worse than the war!’  By which I understood them to mean that the situation couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be viewed as a challenge to self-sacrifice or an inspiration to patriotism; it was merely hell.”

In his lists of deprivation, Kynaston is not unique.  Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska’s Austerity In Britain: Rationing, Controls and Consumption (2000) is, perhaps, a more comprehensive economic summation of rationing strategies.  But Kynaston’s is a social history, preoccupied not just with specifics (although he provides plenty) but also with the panorama.  Occasionally, his forensic eye for social detail misses a forest for the trees – his somewhat glib discussion of India’s emancipation is understandable given his constraints; less so, perhaps, its effects on the domestic racial tensions that prefigured the even greater strife of the 1950s.  But on the whole his is a remarkably balanced, varied chronicle.  Indeed, he writes of a humming organicism, depicting history as a thriving ecosystem whereby the microbes of everyday life are integrally tied to some very big game indeed.

Among these, housing and lifestyle are firm in his sights: the dynamism of Kynaston’s writing comes from his evocation of the post-war landscape not as a static tableau but as a lived-in construction zone.  Largely bankrupt but for the Marshall Plan, his Britain is in viscerally rough shape.  Dan Jacobson, a young South African writer, arrived in London in 1950 and commented, “The public buildings were filthy, pitted with shrapnel-scars, running with pigeon dung [… ] cats bred in the bomb-sites, where people flung old shoes, tin cans, and cardboard boxes; whole suburbs of private houses were peeling, cracking, crazing […] decaying, decrepit, sagging, rotten city.”  (In much post-war fiction, Britain was compared to Babylon, Nineveh, and Pompeii: ruin was the predominant trope.)  Then as now, housing was scarce and population density was high.  The 1950 Census, which surveyed 12.4 million dwellings across Britain, confirmed that, “1.9 million had three rooms or less; that 4.8 million had no fixed bath; and that nearly 2.8 million did not provide exclusive use of a lavatory”, and it also revealed a “significant quantitative as well as qualitative problem: although the official government estimate was that the shortage was around 700,000 dwellings” later re-workings of the data produced “a figure about double that.”  Kynaston’s detailing of the post-war plight is meticulous and evocative; even more so, however, is his discussion of attempted remedies.

Into this crumbling, crowded morass waded a new generation of radical, educated ideologues (along with a few weary, trade-unionist stalwarts), determined to fashion out of year-zero devastation that famous “brave new world”.  No doubt owing to psychological necessity, the era was unprecedentedly forward-looking: post-war urban planning had begun long before the war had even finished.  Within two weeks of the blitz on Coventry in 1940 and during the gradual disintegration of London’s East End, thoughts turned to how and in what manner to rebuild, with the generalised dilemma as whether to reinvent and build up, or to preserve and build out.  The former lobbyists often took as their inspiration Le Corbusier’s plans for modernist tower blocks and public park-space, a functionalist pre-war ideal still popular with many wartime architects.  Advocates for the latter, however, deemed the towering metropolis repressive and retrogressive, instead even more retrogressively recalling Ebenezer Howard’s exurban Garden Cities plan of 1902, with its gemeinschaft wholesomeness and pastoral green belts.  Save in limited builds, neither model was enacted without vast compromise, in part because the Town and Country Planning Acts of 1943, 1944 and 1947 and the New Towns Act of 1946 provided somewhat contradictory mandates, laying the groundwork for historical registry and preservation, compulsory purchase orders, green belts and revised town centres, and thus providing the foundations not just for some very successful post-war compromise builds (such as the Barbican Complex and some of the New Towns) but also for vast red-tape stalemates.

Yet while utopian planners were lining up for a crack at building the “New Jerusalem”, most people worried about rather more pedestrian matters – heating, employment, medicine, bread and either the cancellation or continuance of the local titty show (“I delayed masturbation until another para-nude appeared seen frontways, with drapery descending between the exposed breasts,” Henry St John diaried dutifully).   Indeed, the ideological chasm between average post-war citizens and those starry-eyed architects and statesmen drafting their collective future is a mainstay of Kynaston’s treatise.  He both emphasises and qualifies this tension throughout, and rightly so.

This is, Kynaston reminds us, the era that birthed the Welfare State, introducing nationalised healthcare, educational reform, improved workers’ rights, natural and architectural preservationist movements and vast town-planning schemes.  Yet in 1945, he notes, Britain was 72% working class and had largely voted Labour for reasons of unsurprising self-interest rather than ideology.  (As George Orwell commented, “No one, I think, expects the next few years to be easy ones, but on the whole people did vote Labour because of the belief that a Left government means family allowances, higher old age pensions, houses with bathrooms, etc. rather than from any internationalist consideration.”)  Indeed, in manners and mores, Britain was still deeply conservative.  Divorce was discouraged, racism endemic, and individualism at the fore.  “It hardly took a Nostradamus to see that the outriders for a New Jerusalem – a vision predicated on an active, informed, classless, progressively minded citizenship – were going to have their work cut out,” summarises Kynaston.

In Austerity Britain, such disparities are rendered in bold.  For Kynaston, town-rebuilding is but an archetypal example, with the preservationists and the modernisers divided and a clamorous, dislocated public in the middle.  Kynaston quotes Robert Lutyens, son of Edwin, who wrote into The Times in 1950 championing Corbusier’s modernist utopia and who observed, “We are told of a million dwellings completed, and our hearts sink at the prospect of the semi-detached fallacy indefinitely perpetuated.”  This flies in direct contrast, Kynaston notes, to the Hulton Press’ extensive 1950 survey Patterns of British Life, which implied that for most Britons, the “city of tomorrow” vision was utterly wrongheaded.  Unlike Corbusier’s 60-storey tower blocks, that “semi-detached fallacy” was, for many, a dream home.  “Most people like living in houses rather than flats and they like having a house to themselves,” the report concluded.  “They like their own private domain which can be locked against the outside world and, perhaps as much as anything, they are a nation of garden-lovers.  They want space to grow flowers and vegetables and to sit on Sunday afternoons and they want it to be private.”  (Not much, it seems, has changed.)

On the whole, then, the decisions to affect widespread shifts in town planning, educational strategies and health infrastructure were largely made (or at least attempted) by the London-based few on behalf of the diasporic masses, with careful and often very genuine reference to a “fresh start” founded upon utopian, centralised nationalism.  Unlike most political histories, Kynaston usefully debunks this myth of unification by decentralising it, moving his post-war accounts largely away from Parliament and into the provinces.  His levelling eye is steady and accurate, neither over- nor under-emphasising class and geographic divide.

Thus, he is also careful to remind us that the contrasts between official vision and public demand were not always so marked as with rebuilding strategy.  While doctors greeted Bevan’s National Health Service Act of 1946 with scepticism, for instance, the public generally embraced its creation (although, like now, many griped about the exclusion of some dentistry and spectacles).  Kynaston also heralds union and labour reform, presenting Morris Motors’ founding father Lord Nuffield (formerly William Morris) as the archetypal old guard, an aging tyrant who, “Lear-like, refused to let go […]  There prevailed what one historian has described as a ‘distressing climate of suspicion and indecision.’”  He follows this with first-hand accounts that together paint a picture of working conditions at the Cowley Morris factory as somewhere between a Dickensian work-house and a Big-Brother fishbowl – all a far cry from Sir Charles Bartlett’s newer Vauxhall plant which boasted conditions so harmonious that Bartlett became known to his men as “The Skipper” and the factory itself by the pastoral moniker  “the turnip patch”.

Yet despite many changes for the better (if not best), inevitably the nature of the era proved too difficult to reconcile with public expectation.  General opinion judged changes too fast or too slow, too populist or too elitist; and thus, the post-war government was damned as much by situation as by action.  If new houses were built quickly, their quality was questioned; if tomorrow was cited as the reason for today’s austerity, it still did not excuse the lack of Sunday roasts.  Similar to Labour’s win in 1945, the Conservative takeover in 1951 had less to do with ideology than with desperate promises of an alternative existence that excluded the musty wet wool, the thin-lipped tightfistedness and the slippery, grey cabbages that Kynaston details with such poignant pungency.

Currently a visiting professor at Kingston University, Kynaston has suffered long for his art: his seven-year, four-volume epic The City of London: 1815-2000 was critically well-received but commercially under-sold. Only now with Austerity Britain is he finding the sales to match its universal and deserved acclaim.  He has obviously made these kinds of histories a life-work: the amount of background research that he has undertaken is impressive, as it was in his City of London.  In Austerity Britain, however, Kynaston has honed his narrative voice, producing that rarest of things, a 600-plus page book without a dry moment in it.

Beyond providing fulfilment in the perpetual search for ever more democratic histories, Austerity Britain is remarkable for the surreal contrasts between the often ostentatious consumerism of contemporary life and Kynaston’s angry “mend-and-make-do”-ism alone.  (In a radio interview, he joked that today’s appetite for austerity explained not only to his skyrocketing book sales but also the warm reception of our new Calvinist-flecked Prime Minister.)  Similarly gripping is the breathtaking sweep of post-war social change, which sits in abrupt contrast to our own era where visionaries and lunatics alike seem largely hog-tied by bureaucratic mandate and continual public scrutiny.  But although the past may well seem a foreign country, there is also much that is tellingly recognisable in Kynaston’s account, from cheap cafés’ olfactory gales of stale chip fat and the tyrannical self-righteousness of queue mentality to the ever-controversial Welfare State, eternally loved/hated from within and occasionally (in the example, for instance, of US Democratic candidates’ varied promises of universal health care) envied from without.  Most recognisable, however, is the ubiquity of political apathy and abiding pessimism.  However irrationally, our fears, it seems, remain constant: then as now, the public fretted about youths taking over the city, a decline in educational standards, the redistribution of employment to foreigners, the preservation of the countryside, the demise of the “city historical”, the interference of a nanny state, and the appearance of a seeping social malaise fuelled by faceless barbarians braying at the gates.

Ultimately, though, the most compelling draw of all is Kynaston’s brilliant prose – shrewd, poetic, wry and wonderfully expansive.  Writing from her Dorset retreat in January, 1946, Sylvia Townsend Warner declared that, “No one in wartime can quite escape the illusion that when the war ends things will snap back to where they were and that one will be…able to go on from where one left off.  But the temple of Janus has two doors, and the door for war and door for peace are equally marked in plain lettering, ‘No Way Back’.”  In Austerity Britain, the lettering on the door could not be plainer.

Kristin Anderson is a DPhil candidate in and tutor of English literature. She is also the former Senior Editor of The Oxonian Review of Books.

Although Academy voters were reportedly dulled by 2006-07’s offerings, the popular press heralded this year’s Oscars as one of the most exciting and international yet. Among the heavy-hitting categories (Best Actor and Actress, Best Supportings, Best Director, Best Picture) a more diverse playing field was certainly evident if by diverse, that is, we mean either American-funded (but internationally cast) or British.

Indeed, the British film industry was one of the apparent winners of 2007. Among its contenders were Notes on a Scandal, featuring a flint-faced, squinty-eyed, cackling Dame Judi, Helen Mirren as The Queen, and Venus, a sentimental yet agreeable film about lascivious, long-pensioned actor Peter O’Toole (sorry, played by Peter O’Toole) falling for the neck, breasts and, er, creative juices of a twenty-something chavette. As the barely-aged muse, Jodie Whittaker holds her own in flat Mancunian monosyllables and miniskirts. But there is something wonderful about seeing the eldest generation reclining not in Bournemouth but in Brixton, and as the octagenarian lothario, O’Toole glistens. With droll elocution and the bluest of eyes, he orates Hanif Kureishi’s witty script: upon being reprimanded for fantasising too salaciously, for instance, his character Maurice drawls, ‘There. Now I’m reflecting upon the imminence of my own mortality.  Is that better?’

That said, none of these British films compares to the un-nominated Dogme 95-style  film Red Road. Written and directed by the previously Oscar-winning director Andrea Arnold and shot at the eponymous Glaswegian tower block, Red Road has won the grand prize at eleven international film festivals.   But then, it has only had a partial release in America thus far, so perhaps Arnold is hoping it will be considered for next year’s Oscars.

Realistically, though, Red Road’s chances are slim: it has neither American production money behind it nor the likelihood of mainstream American cineplex release. This is no different than any other art house film, be it American or East Timorese, but it does point to the obvious: that the Oscars are in the “Big 6” categories, anyway a largely Hollywood affair.  Films like Pan’s Labyrinth, directed by Mexican Guillermo Del Toro, may have been nominated for cinematography, special effects and ‘Best Foreign Language Picture’, but these often serve as consolation-prize brackets for ‘Best Picture’-worthy films that fall outside of the wide-release mainstream–the Foreign Language winner, The Lives of Others, is an excellent example of this.  (Incidentally, Del Toro’s film did very well in the end, with Pan’s Labyrinth winning for best Cinematography, Make-Up and Art Direction and thus justly trumping Pirates of the Caribbean II, whose aesthetics this time more resembled the Disney ride that spawned it, and this without the rumored cameo by the borderline animatronic Keith Richards).

But for an event supposedly highlighting world cinema, the 79th Annual Academy awards still oozed Hollywood.  Without a big-name star or a US production company on board, it is difficult for a film to earn even a nomination, much less an award.  Oscar eligibility stipulates that a film must run for at least a week in a Los Angeles theatre and ‘be advertised and exploited during their Los Angeles run in a manner considered normal and customary to the industry.’ (It does not, as we have seen this year, mandate English-language.)  The Foreign Language, Short, Documentary and Animated Films, are exempted from the above requirements, but the high-profile categories are reserved primarily for stars and their vessels. Fair play: it is, after all, a red carpet awards show dreamed up by and showcasing the best of L.A.

But it should come as no surprise, then, that an Oscar year deemed particularly ‘international’ and, indeed, ‘political’ demands a relative reading of such modifiers.  Although the Best Actress nominees included ‘internationals’ Penelope Cruz (for Volver), the Best Supporting Actress nominees included Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi (of Babel), and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu was nominated for Best Director (again Babel), the winners in the main categories were either US or UK actors and either US or US & UK productions (a coincidental inversion of this summer’s Cannes Festival, where Americans won nothing—blame The Da Vinci Code). Politically, while Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth won a close race with My Country, My Country and Iraq in Fragments (both razor-sharp documentaries about modern life in Iraq), the Big 6 categories seemed more politically-themed than genuinely political, just as, in fact, they seemed more internationally-themed than genuinely international.

This, again, is not necessarily a bad thing. The brilliant Forest Whitaker, for example, won Best Actor for playing an ominously jolly Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, and Clint Eastwood’s companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers (2006), the Japanese-language Letters from Iwo Jima, is moving, arresting, and sensitively scripted.   While both films convey an international message—in the former, the dangers of totalitarianism and gap-year, touristy naïveté; in the latter, the simple tragedy of war–their power derives from a historical- and character-based focus, chronicling a particular real-life moment and the charismatic, sometimes monstrous figure at its centre. This is what Hollywood often excels at: nuanced characters and epic histories, not nuanced politics and epic insight.

When it attempts the latter, Hollywood spawns films like Blood Diamond, the earnest, unsubtly-named film about conflict diamonds that rightly earned Djimon Hounsou and Leonardo DiCaprio acting nods; and Babel, whose claims upon cultural and political division is similarly intimated in its towering title, and which collected seven Oscar nominations (but no awards).  These films treat their subjects with problematic glibness and excessive political correctness, and unlike Last King and Iwo Jima, moralise so aggressively that plot and character are soapboxed into irrelevance.

Both Hollywood to the hilt, the differences between Letters  from Iwo Jima, which was a very good film, and Babel, which was a mind-numbing pile of multicultural offal, perhaps deserve closer scrutiny.  In his commissioning of a Japanese-language script from Japanese scriptwriters to counterbalance the American perspective of Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood has produced a film that was well received by the Japanese film industry, despite a few reported inaccuracies.  The Yomiuri newspaper even went so far to claim that, ‘Today the person who had the power to tell us the Japanese experience during the war was Clint Eastwood, an American.’ But more importantly, it is a good film, a blistering depiction of an all-out massacre, and one that for the most part eschews stereotype and simplistic characterisation.

Straight-forwardly organised, Letters from Iwo Jima begins with the Japanese troops preparing for the defense of Iwo Jima’s black sands and culminates in an extended battle sequence that is tragic, conclusive, and viscerally, starkly filmed.  The titular letters home provide an uninventive but effective excuse for flashbacks into a few characters’ lives, a device that could easily slip into sentimentality and sometimes does, but more often merely provides a fascinating, fleeting glimpse into imperial Japan’s political climate.

The acting is uniformly strong. As General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the officer commissioned to lead his vastly outnumbered, outgunned troops to certain death, Ken Watanabe endows his character with independence, shrewdness and geniality. As Saigo, one of the few soldiers who survives (and, not coincidentally, one of the main characters), Japanese pop idol Kazunari Ninomiya is also convincing and provides much comic relief in a film that otherwise is unsurprisingly despairing. Filmed partially in situ, the washed-out colour-filters evoke the bunkers’ gloom and the island’s flattening, blanching heat with cinematographic brilliance, and the landscape is stunningly desolate.

Ironically, Eastwood seems at the height of his directorial powers in a context that must have been very foreign to him. Ultimately, it is a gripping film for all of the above components, but what is singularly impressive is that it doesn’t thump us over the head with the nobility of its balanced perspective.  By avoiding the temptation of ‘Japanese are humans too’ moralising, Letters from Iwo Jima presents the bloody defense of a strategic strip of sand as the context for compelling human drama.  In doing so produces a beautifully-shot, morally complex, cracking good war film that is internationally resonant and still pure Hollywood.

The sweeping ensemble-piece Babel, on the other hand, seems less a film than a contrivance. Amores Perros director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (who are currently engaged in a very public debate as to who can claim more credit for this monumental waste of a popcorn tub) have created a movie that spans three continents, four languages, and many issues: terrorism, tourism, interracial misunderstanding, intercultural misunderstanding, interpersonal misunderstanding —really, misunderstandings of any kind, piled on so fast and thick that the resulting miasma of solitude becomes tedious even before the opening credits.

While it attempts the political edginess of 2005’s Syriana, Babel’s plot is excruciatingly underdeveloped.  Here are the four strands: random A-listers Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett play an American couple on a tour-bus holiday in Morocco; Adriana Barraza plays the Mexican nanny who takes care of their strikingly Aryan children back in California; also in Morocco, a herdsman gives a gun to his shepherding two boys, which he’d gotten off of a Japanese trophy hunter; and in Japan, that trophy hunter struggles to understand the frustrations of his deaf-mute teenage daughter.

These stories are edited together jarringly and sometimes disjointedly so that, at least hypothetically, you have no sense of how they will interconnect, thus implying that actions can have wide-reaching, unintended consequences—the whole bird-crapping-in-jungle-causes-tornado-in-Torquay theory of international-relations causality. Unfortunately, this theme has been done more convincingly and more pointedly before (in screenwriter Arriaga’s earlier, subtler film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, for example).

Moreover, the discontinuous narrative here seems like an editorial gimmick.The splicing of various stories and chronologies is neither a bad, nor an unusual, technique.  It can be used to remove an audience’s dependence on expectation and foreshadowing, to suggest an unpredictable narrative trajectory and to promote fresh, unpresumptuous, character-driven viewing, largely because the climax and resolution are often depicted at the outset.  In Iñárritu and Arriaga’s hands, unfortunately, what could be a subversive, suggestive inquiry becomes fatalistic and altogether too tidy, and the piecemeal editing simply serves to disguise a few melodramatic storylines and to add the illusion of depth where there is none.

What’s more, having messed up the puzzle, they then insist on solving it for you. Plot-twists are sign-posted more frequently than a roadside attraction on the Iowa plains. As soon as the boys get the gun, you know that Cate Blanchett will be shot and that the boys will end up screwed. As soon as García Bernal picks up the nanny and children, you know their cross-border trip is ill-fated.  And although the film dangles the alluring possibility that some of the disparate strands will not join up (thus keeping the screenplay messy and therefore lifelike), in the end Babel ties up as neatly as Julie Andrews’s brown-paper packages.  This makes for boring cinema, leaving the audience nothing left to guess and leaving the actors struggling to flesh out roles that leave little to interpretation.

Although it is clearly angling for the position of global commentator, Babel is actually just a movie about stupid people, doing stupid, oftentimes unrealistic things. No matter how authentic the bigotry and ignorance of the average tour-bus crowd, I fail to believe that they would have left behind a dying woman because they wanted the air-conditioning switched back on.  García Bernal’s car chase is stupid, as is the nanny taking the children across the border and the herdsman giving the high-powered rifle to his young boys.  (And does no one have mobiles or satellite phones?  There’d be no film if so.)

Babel also occasionally promotes the stereotypes it presumably is aiming to offset.  Indeed, the Moroccan men are not terrorists—‘yup, the Americans got that one wrong’—but the character played by Gael García Bernal, whose talent is wasted in this film, doesn’t exactly disprove much about America’s ‘dangerous, irresponsible’ neighbour to the south.  And the improbabilities keep on coming: after the aggressive American border guards embark on a car chase after a drunken Mexican (García Bernal), the nanny (well-played by Adriana Barraza) and two children end up wandering lost through the arroyos of the Californian desert.   After the nanny leaves the children to go find help and the children—you guessed it—are gone when she returns, you start to hope that the lot of them get eaten by coyotes, thus at least adding a bit of migrácion tongue-in-cheek to a film otherwise devoid of irony.

It does, however, have steaming shovels of self-awareness and tailors the film to an audience of politically-correct moralisers. The message is placed in the mouths of tousled blonde innocents, the cherubic film offspring of Cate and Brad: ‘…but why are they looking for us?  We didn’t do anything wrong.’  No, but your parents did, and so did the whole damn world.  Blanched colour filters here seem calculating: we’re supposed to feel relentlessly bleak.  This is ostensibly a movie about international responsibility: a Japanese man gives a gun to a Moroccan herdsman, a woman is shot, a boy is shot, a diplomatic incident is catalysed, a deaf-mute Tokyo girl who likes to go commando hits the club scene, a Mexican wedding ends in a deportation and everyone, generally, is meant to feel guilty about the state of the world and perhaps purified by their guilt.   It’s a movie that allows the armchair liberal to lean back and correct Pitt’s ugly American ignorance (‘but, man, of course he doesn’t have two wives: he’s Moroccan’) and to reflect sagely on the blinding inequalities of the world and the dazzling ignorance of his own kind. It’s manipulative, back-patting, and facile.

The film isn’t entirely without merits: the panorama of the Atlas Mountains is stunning; it has one of the best clubbing-on-Ecstasy cams I’ve yet seen; and there was one incident of humour, when the deaf-mute schoolgirls banter (in sign-language) in the locker room after a volleyball match (‘She’s just premenstrual.’ ‘No, she’s horny.’ ‘Yeah? I’m going to fuck your dad to get rid of my mood.’).  The most intriguing and sustained role is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the most tangential, the least politicised, and necessarily the least scripted: as the deaf-mute Japanese schoolgirl Chieko, Rinko Kikuchi is brilliantly seething and emotive in a side-story that deserved a film to itself.

But at the end of the day, all of the components that make Letters from Iwo Jima an interesting, Oscar-worthy film—in-depth characters, authentic emotion, common humanity and a sense of grounded reality—are missing in Babel. Babel has the ambition of an award-winning ‘international issue’ film without the filmic and political content.  What little message it has even seems internally inconsistent.  Babel’s tagline reads, ‘If you want to be understood…Listen,’ suggesting—as does its title—that it chronicles the dangers of cultural intolerance and promotes transcendent connection. Yet in the end it endorses a deeply isolationist view of the world, suggesting that if lucky we might shelter in the family unit, and that intercultural communication is at best a futile dream.

All it all, with its tricksy editing and multinational settings, Babel seems like globalism lite, profundity-by-numbers, a cynical ploy for a few statuettes. Despite the titular inference, the wedge driven between Babel’s inhabitants isn’t linguistic: it’s opportunistic. Brokeback Mountain composer Gustavo Santaolalla won his second straight Oscar for scoring Babel, a film ‘that helped us understand better who we are and why and what we are here for,’ he said.  If we take him at his word, I understand myself to be an inchoate, reductive pile of bleakness and stereotypes that came to be for the sake of pretension, profit and award-pandering. As its posters advertised, it was indeed this year’s Crash.  More’s the pity.

Kristin Anderson is a DPhil Candidate in English literature at Exeter College, Oxford. She is an editor of The Oxonian Review of Books.

Nights at the Circus
Based on the novel by Angela Carter
Adapted by Tom Morris and Emma Rice.
Directed by Emma Rice.
Lyric Hammersmith from 20 January 2006

The Andersen Project
Written, Directed and Performed by Robert Lepage.
Produced by Ex Machina.
Barbican Theatre, 26 January-18 February 2006

…

Robert Penn Warren once declared that ‘storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement … they’re inexpensive and easy to procure.’ He was referring specifically to the American South, but two new theatre offerings have transplanted such diversions once again to London’s centre-stage. In both, the sex is mostly contextual: the real focus is on storytelling, with all of its associate ambiguities and solipsisms.

The first, and less substantive, of these productions is the Lyric Hammersmith’s reworking of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus. Her 1984 novel has always tempted theatre directors: lush, bawdy, and filled with spectacle, its characters’ brashness and lewd humor complement darker, more sombre inquiries into definitions of progress, storytelling and love.

Sultry circus freak Fevvers, winged-woman and showman, is the star of a slightly sordid turn-of-the-century London cabaret. The irrepressible offspring of Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession and Germaine Greer, ‘The Cockney Venus’ is the archetypal New Woman (updated for the sexier 1980s). A charismatic performer, she is her own MC, spinning the story of her ‘miraculous birth’ and ‘mythological’ life into a limelit livelihood. Into Fevvers’s spotlight trips Walsers, a self-professed cynic—and New York Times journalist, of course—who sets out to expose the barren shoulder blades behind her smoke-and-mirrors and who becomes so captivated by Fevvers that he falls head-over-heels. Literally, as it turns out: bungee-corded aerials are employed skillfully throughout the production as their love burgeons.

The fantastical conviction behind Fevvers’s narration of the mid-air acrobatics is, presumably, supposed to leave the audience unsure if the high-flying love between Fevvers and Walsers is meant to be fiction, metaphor or realised miracle. Actress Natalia Tena as Fevvers tries her best to scheherazade appropriately: she has a huge stage presence and struts around stage like she means it, although her Cockney is more hackneyed than Hackney—think Dick Van Dyke.

Fevvers’s accent is a minor problem. More inexcusable is the gross over-simplification of the book’s plot and style. Huge chunks were cut from the story in this adaptation, including the entire Siberian sojourn. More importantly, its verbal flair—very much the backbone of the story—is diluted. In the novel, the unreliable narrator is appropriately complimented by buckets of wordplay. On stage, however, most of the puns and neologisms, the classical references rife with double entendre, are exchanged for visual slapstick. While the play still manages a few of Carter’s original hi-jinx—Fevvers claims she was born covered with ‘egg shells and nesty bits,’ and uses rhyming slang and literary reference with equal prowess—this abridgement pointlessly leaves little but the basic story, which is a pity. Carter’s characters here seem no more than a collection of raunchy stereotypes: Fevvers is all bluster and breasts and simply isn’t complex enough to be sympathetic; Walsers, as played by Icelandic aerialist Gisli Örn Gardarsson (who is beautifully lithe with excellent comic timing), seems similarly bland, no doubt in part owing to a lack of lines; Boffo the clown is depressed, oversexed and cruel; and the ringmaster, decked out in a ten-gallon hat and a Texan accent, apes about like Steve Bell’s George Bush.

The problem is not with the acting, then, which is consistently good, but with the script and direction. Although necessarily vaudeville, the staging lacks mature humour, cleverness and genuine titillation. Its shock tactics—including cross-dressing, y-fronted clowns, feigned sex and fake genitals, a champagne bottle sprayed as ejaculation (hardly inventive), and the odd nipple or two—were neither shocking nor funny, and inspired nothing more than weariness.

Just so the play’s half-baked attempt at Carter’s themes: fin-de-sieclé anxiety, notions of progress and the dawn of a sexually liberated age become reduced to a cross-dressed Anjoa Andoh singing in bass range ‘die, old century, die/ give us a chance to let yesterday lie’ and too many midnight chimes on New Year’s Eve. More bizarrely, Andoh-as-balladeer later reappears clad in a First World War uniform, perhaps suggesting the subjective nature of time, or maybe a morbid anxiety, or a sardonic commentary on the transcendence of love—but no more is made of it and no other visual anachronisms help place it in context.

Ultimately, despite its bouncy aerials and no doubt lofty ambitions, Nights at the Circus falls very flat, and I left the theatre bored, unamused, and slightly resentful. Most unfortunate of all, I left wondering if perhaps I’d misjudged Carter’s novel.

A far subtler, and more impressive, inquiry into the authenticity and artistry of storytelling is Canadian performance artist and director Robert Lepage’s The Andersen Project. Recently in residence at the Barbican, this big-budget one-man show relates the story of Québécois librettist Frederic Watson, who is hired by the Opéra Garnier to script a children’s opera celebrating Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark’s ‘most famous export.’ The other main character is the artistic producer of the Opéra, who makes it clear that Watson is only being hired and Andersen is only being commemorated out of sycophancy to the Opéra’s Canadian, Danish, and pan-European funding bodies (a pointed jab at Lepage’s own international patronage).

Appropriately, perhaps, Lepage employs Andersen’s biography merely as a window into wider themes. Andersen was an unrequited fetishist, and felt both fascinated with and alienated by sexuality and society at large. Lepage’s latter-day characters inherit some of Andersen’s plight, in magnified and updated form. The Opéra producer’s marriage is on the verge of collapse because of his addiction to pornography; Watson’s career is jeopardised by his naïve integrity; and Rashid, the Algerian porn-palace janitor, is rendered liminal, glimpsed only as a hooded parka graffiti-ing in Metro Invalides ‘…mais pas sans valeur.’ But the temptation to see resemblances between Andersen himself and Lepage’s characters as anything beyond human archetype is openly discouraged, usually by the opera manager’s Gallic shrug and a comment about generic human frailty.

Andersen’s stories are used similarly, serving as discursive launchpads rather than easy metaphor. The inspiration for Garnier’s children’s opera, ‘The Dryad,’ is no Disney fable: avoiding rural ‘once-upon-a-time,’ it is set very specifically in Paris during the 1867 World Fair and obsesses about urban progress (the narrator comes to Paris ‘not on wings of air but on wings of steam’) and its accompanying decadence. And yet The Andersen Project uses the conflict between the romantic and the modern less as direct parallel to postmodern Paris than as self-satirising cliché, and, more expansively, as a caution against the dangers of over-simplification and glib conclusion.

The play’s structure reflects this: a mise-en-abyme, The Andersen Project feverishly and cleverly cascades between ‘characters’ and ‘narrator’, and between opera and striptease. Project opens with a man—possibly Watson, possibly Lepage—apologising to a packed Opéra Garnier for the cancellation of ‘The Dryad’ owing to a strike and proposing instead to dramatise one Canadian’s self-discovery in contemporary Paris. From there, Lepage heads full-tilt into a whirling, sympathetic tale whose primary lesson is self-fulfilling: the necessity of looking beyond a parable’s easy morals for a more chaotic system of truths, relations, and causes (if, of course, such connections can be drawn at all).

Lepage’s scope is broad indeed, targeting in two short hours the pastoral vs. the urban, the cruelty of children, the ‘civility’ of adults, the importance of the Parisian expo of 1867, sexual fantasy, contemporary socio-economic inequality, racism, colonial longing for the motherland, old-world decadence, therapy culture and the politics of the individual, and the bureaucratic inanity of arts councils. Ambitious, certainly. But rather than appearing glib, The Andersen Project radiates an ironic authenticity expressly because of its irresolution and unwillingness to offer easy moral answers.

Remarkably amidst all these mighty themes, the show also remains spectacularly entertaining, with little of the self-importance and egotism usually associated with one-man-shows. The choreography is well-oiled and the staging hi-tech. It is supremely clever: the Parisian lapdog (addicted to Prozac and ecstasy, and a charming mainstay of the performance) is reduced to a jingling collar darting about on a zipline at ankle level. Likewise, when Watson pops a couple of the dog’s meds on a train between Copenhagen and Paris, hardcore beats fill the Barbican (to the incomprehension, no doubt, of many a white-haired patron) and the rail tracks retreat a tempo into a distant point that slowly opens up into a techno laser. Opéra Garnier becomes an interactive, photo-real flatscreen—and yet it’s the simple black-box porn palace that is so filthily authentic you can smell it. Lepage manages character and costume shifts with miraculous speed, and is a convincing actor: from Canadian to Continental, he gets the accents and demeanors dead-on.

There are a few meagre problems: because the show’s scope is so wide, a couple of themes feel too tangential. For one, to portend the banlieues’ imminent revolution by hasty mention of Rashid’s disenfranchisement seems a bit overly topical (in both senses). Compared with Nights at the Circus, however, this is a flaw of ambition, not omission, and taken independently, The Andersen Project amply, entertainingly, and thoughtfully delivers. Lepage’s storytelling is virtuosic, and his story provocative and euphoric. If great theatre should involve high-flying, intelligent wit and adroit showmanship, this is as close to perfect as it gets.

Kristin Anderson is a DPhil student in English Literature at Exeter College, Oxford.

Siegfried by Richard Wagner
The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Director: Keith Warner
Music Director: Antonio Pappano
2, 7, 10, 14, 18, 22 October 2005

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant by Gerald Barry
English National Opera
Director: Richard Jones
Conductor: Andre de Ridder
From 16 September 2005

Much has been made of Keith Warner’s new production of the Ring cycle, and justifiably so. His is a jejune retelling, abrasively gimmicky and filled with crass over-attention to detail commingled with blindness to the resulting silliness.

In fact, for a latter-day parable of frail gods and heroic men, Warner’s production is redolent with the frailties of man. Hubris and sycophantic populism collide in its design, mingling a futuristic minimalism—lots of steel and white, and oddities like a downed Messerschmitt whose propeller fuels the bellows of the forge—with an infantile insistence on actualizing every last symbol (hardly necessary given Wagner’s own proclivities). The Woodbird not only appears onstage but skips about (rather laboriously) dragging a bird-shaped kite; Mime’s final scene sees him clad in a rat’s head straight out of Toad Hall; leitmotifs drop with the delicacy of anvils. The absurdity climaxes in the dream sequence, when two children appear on stage covered in flour and wheeling a life-sized white plastic stag glued to the top of a gurney. Siegfried then clambers onto it and hugs it like a rich girl does her first pony. Overall, it is a condescendingly literal staging—except when it is not: Siegfried’s discovery of Brünnhilde occurs behind a stage-sized white panel with a small door, leaving his narration to come when he throws himself in vaudeville shock-horror back into the flood-lit portal. An odd device, given this moment’s dramatic potential.

With last spring’s Die Walküre, superb musicianship easily transcended such ridiculous staging. With Siegfried, however, we’ve no such luck. The role of Siegfried is physically exhausting, demanding that the singer be on-stage for the better part of four hours. Unfortunately John Treleaven as the eponymous hero had neither the vocal stamina nor the charisma to carry it off. Act One’s interminable forging scene is supposed to be a show-stopper, but for all of its accompanying pyrotechnics Siegfried’s triumphant cry of ‘Nothung!’ was feeble and noticeably flat. In fact, Treleaven’s tuning throughout was unreliable. More so his acting, which turned the naïve narcissism of Siegfried into loutish idiocy, leaving little sympathy for his exploits. And though the orchestra was serviceable, it was also a bit messy, imperfectly tuned and with the horns—important for all of those fanfares—often out of sync.

Fortunately, the other principals picked up some of the slack. Phillip Ens’ Fafner was darkly resonant and Lisa Gasteen’s Brünnhilde was every inch the Valkyrie. And even his Gandalf costume couldn’t interfere with John Tomlinson’s interpretation of Wotan: he sung magnificently, bringing a disillusioned, decaying maturity to the role captured so energetically by Bryn Terfel earlier in the year. But that the slapstick Mime (a brilliant Gerhard Siegel) so easily stole the show hardly cemented the gravitas of Siegfried’s epic premise.

Although a Greek tragic mask occupies a prominent space on stage, the premise of the English National Opera’s recent The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is pointedly anything but epic. Usually celebrated/derided for its accessibility, this time the ENO has attempted a more adventurous tack by staging Gerald Barry’s dissonant score of Rainer Warner Fassbinder’s 1973 play. So text-dense that the Coliseum employed supertitles, Petra is a black comedy of the Abigail’s Party mold, stuffed to the breaking point with the banality of love, materialism, and middle-class pretensions.

Unlike Abigail’s Party, however, there’s no dramatic progression—no massive fall, and certainly no transformation or redemption. It’s merely a snapshot of middle-aged haute couture designer Petra von Kant (think Eva Peron meets Norma Desmond) and her love for vacuous redneck-cum-model Karen. They flirt, Petra breaks down, they shag a lot, Petra obsesses, Karen leaves, Petra remains drunk. Fassbinder’s script is appropriately colloquial and everyday. The two biggest laughs, for instance, come from an apathetic ‘Go fuck yourself’ (amusing, I suppose, simply for the venue in which it was sung?) and Petra’s bored inquiry into her daughter’s latest crush: ‘Let me guess: tall, thin, blonde and looks a little like Mick Jagger?’ Of its much-vaunted lesbianism, Petra doesn’t say much—as the playwright said about a former film of his, it could as easily have revolved around heterosexual love affair. In fact, the script doesn’t say much about anything: its point is the mere chronicle of bathetic hysteria, the tedium of a diva doing the diva thing.

The nominal lesbianism does, of course, permit an entirely female cast, which in turn allows for a registration that glibly slips into the intended shrillness. The score must be a challenging one for musicians: because it is so verbose, there is lots of recitative; because it is histrionic, there are no grand themes and many subtly-changing dissonances. Overall, it’s brassy and frantic, full of chromatics and jagged vocal lines. There’s no relief, either, no moments of contrasting gentleness: the poor, bored strings are practically non-existent; the orchestra’s dynamic remains at a rather distant, reedy forte; and there are certainly no arias. Petra’s blustery personality dominates throughout—the only other character with a noticeable theme is her secretary/slave Marlene, whose oboes, clarinet and flute peer out occasionally and then are squashed by the horns of her mistress. There are a few laughs in the music: after Karen emotionally relates her parents’ darkly comic deaths, the score camps it up, ascending chromatically into squeaky breathiness long after she’s finished. Mostly, though, the music operates by contrast. Dramatic and jarring, its operatic clichés—marching music during quarrels, fanfare during toothbrushing—reminds us again that this ain’t exactly the stuff of myth.

For the most part, the production itself was superb. Stephanie Friede as Petra stumbled across the stage with conviction, and managed to add nuance and pathos to a vocal line lacking any. Rebecca von Lipinski as Karen was a better actress than she was singer—even from a few rows back it was difficult to hear her, and while she excelled at capturing Karen’s listlessness, some of her more impassioned musical moments fell a bit flat. The other highlight was Linda Kitchen as Marlene, Petra’s personal assistant, whose perpetual silence (infuriating for a trained opera singer, surely) and deadpan expression inspired more sympathy than all of Petra’s frenzies. Director Richard Jones’ staging was entertaining: calling in a man named Ultz as set-designer, it featured a television and record player used, respectively, for comedic non sequitur (flashes of adverts, a documentary on the Masai’s tribal dance) and for a kind of meta-tedium (orchestra echoing LP echoing orchestra). The aesthetic was fun as well—the stage was meticulously mod (bare wood, bubbled patterns with space-age aspirations, greens and browns and oranges predominant), and the costumes were empire-waisted and, appropriately, none too flattering.

However, the unfortunate problem of the score, as with the play itself, is that the depiction of banality is, ultimately, banal. Appreciating its ironies and wry cultural critique only diverts for so long. In the end, the monotony of both plot (another fight, another shag, another hangover) and score (chromatic, jagged, loud—yeah, we get it) made it easy to loose attention: after a few measures of ‘Fetch me another gin and tonic’ jumping between the first and the fifth repeatedly (har.), you start thinking about Christmas shopping. And while there is something kind of charming about a desultory ‘Yeah’ sung by a resonant mezzo at full concert-hall volume, the joke wears thin rather quickly. Unlike with Siegfried, the company and the director do as best they can with a limited subject matter, but at the end of a long two hours, there’s little worth remembering. Whether Barry and Fassbinder’s invocations of Wagner (Karin’s stay at the down-at-heel Hotel Rheingold, Wotan’s hunting call during sips of tepid coffee) are employed to trivialize Wagner or to trivialize their heroine (I suspect both), Petra is very much the flip side of Covent Garden’s rusty coin.

Kristin Anderson is a DPhil student in English Literature at Exeter College, Oxford.

Masturbation. Paedophilia. Sheep-fucker. Guffawing yet? If so, then you’ve got a smashing night of cabaret ahead of you. Welcome to the Tiger Lillies, a three-man stage band that, despite a novel blend of acid folk music, Rive-Gauche kitsch, and porn-shop panto, fails utterly to move beyond banality.

The Tiger Lillies have a lengthy history in avant-garde performance: since 1989, front man Martin Jacques, bassist Adrian Stout and percussionist Adrian Huge have been following in the footsteps of Kurt Weill (as their promotional website proclaims), merging vaudeville slapstick with edgily sordid torch songs. It has proved a winning combination for them, garnering them an Olivier Award in 2002 and a Grammy nomination in 2003 for their tribute album to the art of Edward Gorey, The Gorey End. And yet the Lillies’ newest CD and stage-show give no hint of such promise.

Entitled Death and the Bible, it features songs about, well, death and the Bible—or, to be more specific, about matricide, suicide, incest, incontinence, and Mary Magdalene’s shagging of Jesus. Drawing on everything from jazz to opera, with snippets of gypsy song and the odd blues riff tossed in, the Tiger Lillies’ musical style is difficult to pigeonhole. Not so their content and stage presence, which are ploddingly grotesque. Setting blasphemous or scatological themes to operatic aria could be mildly diverting, were the musical compositions more finessed and the taboos more risqué. As it stands, Jacques’ faked castrato is too laboured and shrill to enable continued attention to the lyrics, which themselves are written in rhymes that Seuss would find simplistic. Imagine two hours of a scratchy falsetto warbling such naughty witticisms as, ‘I’m incontinent, I soil the sheets/ my heartbeat is growing weak/ I even find it hard to speak as my urine from me leaks’, or ‘Mummy, my mummy, my mummy/ She’s in a mental home’. Riotous, no?

Because of the ululating vocals and the bland libretto, the quicker, punkier ensemble numbers are more tolerable than the ballads. The two Adrians are solid accompanists if technically unexciting, although Jacques’ unending shuffling between the accordion—which sets the musical tenor for the evening—and piano is more cosmetic than competent. That the music exists solely as a backdrop for slapstick posturing is apparent, and is a pity, as the only slight pleasure comes from watching the bassist, who occasionally drops his deadpan facade enough to be seen enjoying himself. That, and from limping to the Soho Theatre’s bar, which is mercifully affordable.

All of this not withstanding, however, the primary problem with the Tiger Lillies, is that despite their professed raison d’être — ‘I’m trying to confuse, disorientate and destroy!’ intones Jacques unironically — their brand of revolution simply does not shock, does not provoke. At least Jerry Springer: The Opera included a barbed bit of political satire and moral commentary: this has a kind of Big Brother senselessness — a mere cataloguing of bodily functions and half-baked fantasies compiled with the self-conscious puerility of the primary school exhibitionist who examines the exhumed contents of his nostrils before re-ingesting them. There’s nothing destructive about watching a middle-aged man in pancake makeup. Grabbing testicles while wailing about dead babies wears thin after, oh, the first three seconds, and a fat man with a mallet destroying his drum set ceased to be revolutionary after Animal picked up the trick in the Muppet Show.

Ultimately, this is not good music. Nor is it theatre in any sense, whether traditional or avant-garde: it is neither transformative nor provocative, neither profound nor pleasurable; it has neither the pointed nihilism of Beckett or Pinter, nor the irreverent anarchy of Weill and Brecht. At best, its intentional amorality might be an unintentional homage to Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, albeit with themes so overexposed that all shock value and subsequent moral discomfort disappear. It’s nothing, in fact, save for a sweaty, noise-filled misuse of two hours, two hours during which one could have been watching something comparatively enlightening, such as a spaniel licking itself, or maybe that ABBA musical.

Kristin Anderson is a D.Phil student in English Literature at Exeter College, Oxford. She writes on Second World War-era London.

Marjane Satrapi
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
Pantheon Books, 2004
192 pages
ISBN 0375422889

Marjane Satrapi
Persepolis: The Story of an Iranian Childhood
Pantheon Books, 2003
160 pages
ISBN 0375422307

‘Image is an international language,’ Iranian graphic artist Marjane Satrapi declares. ‘When you draw a situation—someone is scared or angry or happy—it means the same thing in all cultures… It is more accessible.’ ¹ For her, this is less comment than credo: from the outset, it is clear that Satrapi is targeting an international market. Persepolis (2004), Satrapi’s two-volume graphic memoir of her upbringing in, egress from and return to post-revolutionary Iran, contains a fiercely propagandistic streak which is advanced by her choice of the graphic medium. Certainly, her striking, tender illustrations and necessarily laconic text both work compellingly towards one end: correcting western misperceptions of Iran.

Writing from Paris in the paranoid political climate of early 2002, Satrapi finished Persepolis amidst the militant grumblings of a White House already anticipating a ‘pre-emptive liberation’ of ‘evil’ Iran. Such Western demonising is precisely what Persepolis seeks persuasively to undermine. Indeed, while critical of the Iranian theocracy, Satrapi remains a fervent patriot at heart, explicitly asserting her memoir as a counter-narrative to Western prejudice. The first volume of Persepolis is prefaced by a simple, and at times simplistic, polemic—part Iranian history-for-dummies (‘yet the Persian language and culture withstood these invasions, and the invaders assimilated into this strong culture, in some ways becoming Iranians themselves’) and part mission statement: ‘this old and great civilization has been mentioned mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. …I know this image to be far from the truth. I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists.’

Not surprisingly, Satrapi’s publisher L’Association endorsed her quest for wide exposure: even before publication, Persepolis was heavily marketed as the Franco-Iranian answer to Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986). Unfortunately, too many reviewers jumped on this bandwagon. To compare a graphic memoir to Maus is to a young artist what it is to label a songwriter the new Dylan, and the many critics who suggested as much do her a disservice. For one, the comparison is inapt. Perhaps because Satrapi writes within the more mainstream French graphic books industry, the text has none of Maus’ artistic self-consciousness, nor does it reflect Maus’ questioning and subversion of memoir as authentic historical record. Moreover, while Spiegelman uses the graphic format to build up intricate symbologies, Satrapi illustrates mostly at face value, employing her illustrations more photographically than metaphorically. Yet though her work is not as self-aware, sweeping, or meticulous as Spiegelman’s, or even as Joe Sacco’s (author of Palestine, to whom she’s also been compared), it is still unflinching and immensely poignant.

Raised in a left-leaning and privileged family in Tehran, Satrapi’s autobiography begins in 1979 when, ‘after a long sleep of 2500 years, the revolution has finally awakened the people’. Her upbringing was, she acknowledges, far from commonplace: after being given a comic book entitled Dialectical Materialism, her pre-adolescent self dismisses a previous calling to prophecy and assumes the mantle of Che Guevera, forming schoolyard juntas and at one point somewhat bemusedly yelling at her mother, ‘Dictator! You are the guardian of the revolution of this house!’ (Subsequently, when Allah still makes the odd appearance in her dreams, conversations become a bit awkward: ‘So you don’t want to be a prophet anymore?’ ‘Let’s talk about something else.’ ‘…You think I look like Marx?’ ‘I told you to talk about something else.’ ‘…Tomorrow the weather’s going to be nice.’)

For all of its charm and idiosyncrasies, her privileged perspective can at times seem a bit at odds with her prefatory goals: this is hardly an everyman’s story. Her Iran is a small one, a snapshot of Tehranian upper-middle class intellectuals who can afford to send their children abroad when domestic politics get too dodgy. Although she mentions that her grandfather was a prince and later served as prime minister under Reza Shah, we also don’t know why the vocal Satrapis can remain relatively unscathed both financially and politically through such tumultuous times. How little she and her family suffer by comparison is a constant, guilty theme, and Satrapi is blunt about both her guilt and her privilege. Schoolyard falsehoods of revolutionary one-upmanship (of the ‘my dad’s in prison’…‘yeah, well, my dad’s been dismembered’ ilk) are recalled with embarrassment; and years later she admits, after being arrested and fined yet again for alcohol consumption, that, ‘To be able to party, you had to have means.’

Progressing episodically through her childhood, the first volume of Persepolis addresses more serious and formative political occurrences than the second, albeit from a more oblique vantage point. Her perspective matures as she ages. Book one begins with childlike naivety: political events are filtered through day-to-day happenstance. This is an affective strategy, resulting in a seemingly immediate and unmediated narrative. Historical watersheds—the burning of the Rex Cinema, the US embassy hostage crisis—are nightmarishly surreal and fleeting, conjured out of schoolyard gossip and adult whispers. As her political consciousness develops, however, so too does the realism of her images. Situated in the interstices between the political and the personal, much of Persepolis’ potency derives from the disjunction between Satrapi’s plain, matter-of-fact descriptions and the often horrific events depicted. Thus, by the time the first book reaches its shattering climax—the torture and execution of her favourite uncle—so deliberately, brutally minimalist are Satrapi’s images that the inexpressibility of her grief is tangible to a wholly empathetic audience.

More retrospective and sage, book two features an older Satrapi in place of the childlike narrator of the first volume. Accordingly, although Persepolis 2 covers less epic political events, it is more wry and, for its wisdom, more touching. Sent to Vienna by parents worried about the increasing political tumult, it opens with fourteen-year-old Marjane newly-arrived at her Catholic boarding house. Not surprisingly, her culture-shock is immense, but Satrapi records it with customary irony (her comment of, ‘It’s going to be cool to go to school without a veil, to not have to beat oneself every day for the war martyrs,’ is countered by a vacuous cousin’s stare and the insightful retort of, ‘this is my raspberry-scented pen, but I have strawberry and blackberry ones, too’).

She has a keen eye for caricature, and some of her finest humour—as well as her most effective and subtle political commentary—comes by deadpan depiction of the vapidity and absurdity of her European counterparts (a direct parallel, she suggests, to the ignorance and bluster informing much of Iranian culture). As a outsider, Satrapi makes friends with the marginalised, with secondary- school punks who smoke up, fl ip through Sartre (‘my comrades’ favourite author…I found him a little annoying’), and admire her because she’s ‘known death’; and with anarchists, whose main subversive pastimes include playing volleyball, misquoting Bakunin and doing a bit of LSD. With droll precision, she zips through her intellectual development, voraciously absorbing everything from the history of the commune (‘I concluded that the French right of this epoch were worthy of my country’s fundamentalists’) to her mother’s much-loved de Beauvoir:

Simone explained that if women peed standing up, their perception of life would change. So I tried. It ran lightly down my left leg… Seated, it was much simpler. And, as an Iranian woman, before learning to urinate like a man, I needed to learn to become a liberated and emancipated woman.

She manages this emancipation thoroughly, if fitfully. Her sexual adolescence —the ridiculousness of her first boyfriends, living with eight gay men, developing a sizeable ass—is traversed with typical retrospective self-mockery. (Early attempts at romance are candid and cringingly recognisable.) Secure finally in her sexuality, her intellect and her fiercely-guarded independence, she finishes secondary school with moderate success and, after a brief stint on the streets owing to bad luck and a drug habit, heads back to Tehran.

When she returns to Iran, however, her re-immersion is far from easy: Tehran’s streets have been renamed after the martyrs whose faces now adorn building-sized murals; her childhood friends have lost limbs in the trenches or have glammed up into husband-hunting hostesses; there is a palpable, silent tension between her parents; and her embarrassment over what she regards as the personal failures of the previous four years, particularly when contrasted with hardships of a nation, leads to a chain of uncomprehending therapists and eventually a suicide attempt. Having reached her nadir, Satrapi rallies. In a few heady pages she goes from overdose to aerobics instructor to art school candidate—no mean feat given that 40 percent of all university places are reserved for children of the martyrs and that any university entrant must first pass a draconian ideological exam.

The second half of Persepolis 2 is constantly backgrounded by political upheaval, and it is here, telling a personal story with political incidentals, that her autobiography is most compelling. During the early eighties, the government had imprisoned and executed so many students that by 1990, even the most educated, satellite- TV-nourished young adults avoided overt political demonstration. Revolution was relegated to the details:

It hinged on…showing your wrist, a loud laugh, having a walkman… The regime had understood that one person leaving her house while asking herself: ‘Are my trousers long enough?’ ‘Is my veil in place?’ ‘Can my makeup be seen?’ no longer asks herself: ‘Where is my freedom of speech?’ ‘My life, is it liveable?’ ‘What’s going on in the political prisons?’

Courtship itself becomes an act of rebellion: in a world of single-sex staircases (so men cannot watch women ascend), wearing the maghnaeh sexily becomes ‘a real science—you learn how to fold it so that from the side no hair is visible but from the front small locks appear’. The conservatory too is a minefield: some of Satrapi’s most scathing sarcasm is justifiably reserved for the hypocrisies inherent to an art institute run by a fundamentalist state. When presented with a (fully-clothed) male model, she’s chastised for looking at him directly; her incredulous query of, ‘Should I draw this man while looking at the door???!!’ is met by a terse, un-ironic, ‘Yes’. Similarly, after explaining the difficulty of studying anatomy as modelled by a woman in a chador, she dryly concludes, ‘We nevertheless learned to draw drapes.’

Perhaps inevitably, a healthy underground culture arises amongst her college friends. Behind firmly closed doors, they pose for each other without inhibition; hidden satellite dishes broadcast CNN; drinking, smoking, sex and (tragically) Bon Jovi are derigueur. And while such minor licenses at times have devastating consequences— in three wordless pages of beautifully austere silhouettes, a friend falls to his death in a moonlit flight from police—the parallels she draws between her own life and her readers’ are apparent. The same vanities, the same insouciance. ‘The more time passed,’ she concludes with a newcomer’s relief, ‘the more I became conscious of the contrast between the official representation of my country and the real life of the people, the one that went on behind the walls.’

To that end, while Satrapi makes an effort to show most sides to an argument—once even depicting a mullah sympathetically—for the most part hers is a narrative infused with disbelief, irony and rage both at those who perpetuate Iran’s fundamentalism and at those who judge it from afar. Her refusal to mention any Ayatollah is a pointed act of resistance – although it restricts an already limited perspective and political salience – that echoes her opening plea for ‘an entire nation…[to] not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists’. This is obviously fair, but were she to widen her scope to include information about these extremists, who must surely number more than a ‘few’, it might make her account seem a bit less one-sided and narrow without compromising her politics too severely.

Had she stuck to straightforward memoir, it would have served her educational aims just as effectively. Unfortunately, on the rare occasion when Satrapi does interrupt her autobiography with overt polemic, it typically takes the form of condescendingly didactic asides. Obviously intended for myopic post-9/11 westerners, these elementary history lessons have all of the realism of the Marx- Descartes conversation in her Dialectical Materialism primer. The odd footnote is understandable, perhaps even useful (an asterisk at the bottom of a cell noting that ‘the term “mujahideen” isn’t specific to Afghanistan. It means a combatant’); and the occasional lapse into clumsy platitude forgivable (‘besides, fear has always been a driving force behind all dictators’ repression’). But her already clunky dialogue exacerbates such abrasive and unnatural moralising—take, for example, the following assessment cleverly camouflaged by familial conversation:

Marjane: The western media also fights against us. That’s where our reputation as fundamentalists and terrorists comes from!

Mom: You’re right. Between one’s fanaticism and the other’s disdain, it’s hard to know which side to choose. Personally, I hate Saddam and I have no sympathy for the Kuwaitis, but I hate just as much the cynicism of the allies who call themselves ‘liberators’ while they’re there for the oil.

Cue visible flinch. Surely if the redressing of balances is her goal, hard-hitting reportage—interviews with those who endured Iraq’s US-sponsored assault, or even the straightforward citation of statistics—would be more effective. Instead, Satrapi mounts the soapbox and damn well pummels her point home.² This occasional pedantic streak is unfortunate, as the humour and frankness of her story go much further towards humanising Iran.

Fortunately, her illustrations amply compensate for her prose’s heavy-handedness. Striking and brutal, her monochromatic, largely untextured images ably evoke the oppressiveness of the Islamic Republic and particularly its strictures of attire (women are often reduced to silhouettes, opaque and anonymous). And yet out of these austere lines, she coaxes an extraordinary amount of facial expression: distinguishing from a morass of veils and shadow the shades of each character’s personality is something Satrapi micromanages down to the dimple.

Though her images tend more toward the literal than the metaphorical, Persepolis’ dream sequences and moments of crisis (the onset of the Iran-Iraq war, her departure from Tehran, the torture of her uncle) often edge towards the jagged surrealism of French artist and acknowledged forebear David B. (Epileptic). On these occasions, Satrapi’s usually pared-down illustrations become richly and widely allusive, pointedly commingling western tradition with two and half centuries of Persian culture. The pietà is invoked twice: once poignantly, as her mother faints into her father’s arms as she boards the plane for Vienna, and once ironically, a woman in a chador clutching a martyr in military uniform; many of the textures of Achaemenian/Sasanian art reappear in the background of dream sequences and epic histories; and the Islamic crescent moon rises at her lowest points with a sarcastic twinkle. Brilliantly, her single-cell delineation of ‘2500 years of tyranny and submission’ is rendered as bas-relief pastiche, with Mongolian cavalry toe-to-heel with sunglass-clad Marxists and Uncle Sam. As Cyrus the Great gazes at the scene in comic despair, Satrapi bringing history full circle with tongue-in-cheek wit. Clearly, she’s still a patriot at heart: this incarnation of Iranian governance, she suggests repeatedly, is merely the latest in a cyclical history—there is something intrinsic to Iranian national character that withstands superficial ideologies. The ruins of Persepolis thus provide her with a perfect metaphor: an icon intriguing to and beloved of the western tourist, it is also a symbol of both imperial transience and the tenacity of Persian nationalism.

Ultimately, the graphic medium suits her purposes well for several reasons: for one, her prose is neither eloquent nor original enough to stand on its own. For another, the restrictions of her pared-down illustrations suit the absolutes and ironies of both Iran and Europe, and subtly draw parallels between the two that in straight text would lack nuance. Moreover, the graphic format permits her to oscillate between journalistic realism and solipsistic whimsy far more than would a more traditional autobiographical format. Finally, as she acknowledges, it renders the subject less serious, more sympathetic, more accessible—all desirable traits for a woman seeking to change the world’s mind.

Of course, now, in 2005, her prefatory mission might seem a bit less urgent. Iranian/Western political relations are inching away from the messianic bellicosity of Bush’s infamous ‘axis of evil’ speech and towards grudging diplomacy, as in the case of the recent Nuclear Proliferation talks. And given Europe’s recent inundation by Iranian cultural exports—the bestselling Reading Lolita in Tehran, Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni, the widespread acclaim of new films by Kiarostami, Maghsoudlou, and Maryam Keshavarz—Satrapi’s zeal to introduce Iranian counter-culture to the west might seem a bit overstated. Nevertheless, her endemic humour, arresting illustration and the comic-book format itself (‘People don’t take it so seriously,’ she admits) effectively off set the moralising gravitas of her prologue. Certainly, Satrapi’s autobiography is so likeable that despite a didactic strain it remains an engaging, compelling read. While Persepolis’ feistiness and creativity pay tribute as much to Satrapi herself as to contemporary Iran, if her aim is to humanise her homeland, this amiable, sardonic and very candid memoir couldn’t do a better job.

Kristin Anderson is is an American DPhil student in English Literature at Exeter College, Oxford.

Notes

1. Interview with Dave Welch, 17.9.2004 (http://www.powells.com/authors/satrapi.html).
2. Of course, if nuance and taste are so lacking in our own critical vocabulary that Persepolis is deemed a ‘stylish, clever and moving weapon of mass destruction’ by the Telegraph, perhaps Satrapi’s within her rights to underestimate us.