Amol Rajan
Twirlymen: The Unlikely History of Cricket’s Greatest Spin Bowlers
Yellow Jersey, May 2011
400 Pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-0224083232

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Shehan Karunatilaka
Chinaman
Jonathan Cape, April 2011
416 Pages
£12.99
ISBN 978-0224091459

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Bowlers in the game of cricket can be classified as either seamers or spinners. Seamers aim to deliver the ball with power so that it hits the pitch at high speed; they tend to be tall, strong men, enabling them to get greater pace and bounce. Spinners, however, aim to turn the ball in the hand as it is released, sending it travelling down the pitch with no great momentum, but making it subject to all kinds of menace when it lands, depending on the direction of the spin, how high into the air the ball is tossed, and how much the wind causes it to drift in the air. Spin bowlers come in all shapes and sizes. India’s Anil Kumble was tall and elegant; Shane Warne of Australia was of average height but above-average girth; while England’s lesser-known ‘Tich’ Freeman was a mere 5-foot-2 and remains the only man to take 300 wickets in a single season. Spin bowling is, as such, a mental process, dependent on outwitting and tricking the opponent. As batsmen have found out, the humiliation of being out-thought can be just as intimidating as being out-muscled.

Spin is a word that now has heavy political connotations, to the extent that it is a necessary weapon in the armoury of any contemporary candidate, carrying with it connotations of deceit and manipulation. A great spinner in cricket possesses the same ability: the ball can be hidden or obscured from view in any number of ways. The rotation of the arm in bowling the ball can appear identical to that of an entirely different type of delivery. Add in boasts about developing brand new variations in an attempt to intimidate batsman before a ball has even been bowled, and it is clear that spin bowling is a psychological art.

Amol Rajan, an editor at The Independent, focuses on the cerebral aspects of spinning in his new book Twirlymen, a well researched history of the discipline from the earliest underarm practitioners to the exploits of the modern record-breakers Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan. Rajan charts the development of spinning through the successes and failures of the personalities drawn to what can be an unforgiving and lonely pursuit. Inevitably, the most successful passages of the book are those in which he dissects complex personalities. He writes well on the torment of England’s Tony Lock, a gifted player who had the misfortune to bowl in tandem with fellow spinner Jim Laker when Laker took 19 wickets in a Test against Australia:

Lock said years later that he wished he hadn’t denied Laker all twenty, and perhaps from his point of view that would have lessened the focus on his comparative failure in that July Test. It might then have been all about Laker, and not just 95 per cent about him, which naturally draws attention to the conspicuous 5 per cent remaining.

This section (and several others) add grit to the wheels. The chronological format of Twirlymen is such that it has the tendency to read as a procession of one hugely successful player emulating and outdoing his forebears.

Rajan clearly wants spinners not only to return to prominence, but also to receive the credit that he believes that they deserve. Twirlymen is driven by a feeling of injustice against the developments in cricket that have made the spinner’s life as difficult as possible. Pitches have become flatter with shorter boundaries, and technology has been developed that enables batsmen to examine a spinner’s tricks and disguises in forensic detail. Certainly, Twirlymen ought to be good for the reputations of several spinners who have slipped into obscurity, such as Sonny Ramadhin of the West Indies, who retired to run a pub in the north of England, and Australia’s Arthur Mailey, whose previous career as a glass-blower toughened his fingers to the extent that he avoided the cuts and tears that plague other spinners.

Twirlymen has a happy ending, though, owing to the resurgence in spin bowling in the past decade. Although, in Warne and Murali, Test cricket had two bowlers of both skill and longevity (and who took more wickets than any brawny seamer has ever managed) the most interesting development is actually how spinners have responded to the development of Twenty20 cricket, which has led to more aggressive batting and faster scoring than ever before. One would expect spinners to suffer at the hands of less risk-averse batting, or at least, to lose their attacking edge. However, in the frenetic setting of T20, the mental agility of a good spin bowler has seen the practice thrive. It is a shame that this development is passed over in only two pages.

Chinaman, the debut novel by a Sri Lankan author, Shehan Karunatilaka, shrouds spin bowling in a page-turning account of mystery and deception. The narrative thrust of the novel concerns shambling, alcoholic journalist WG (or Wije) Karunasena’s search for a spin bowler named Pradeep Mathew, about whom he wishes to write a book. Statistically, Mathew was an ordinary player who managed only four Test match appearances for Sri Lanka before disappearing into obscurity. However, Wije is convinced that Mathew was a bowling genius, and that his career was cut short by the political manoeuvring that parasitically feeds off cricket in Sri Lanka. Having witnessed Mathew’s extraordinary range of deliveries, which include zooters, floaters, and an unprecedented double-bounce ball, Wije is determined to restore his reputation, a task that brings him into contact with the seamier side of Sri Lankan society.

Mathew, one senses, would not have gained Rajan’s approval. He is not a great thinker who bamboozles batsmen with carefully laid plans. Rather, he is impulsive, short-tempered, and lazy, a man who happens to play some exceptional cricket in the interim periods between upsetting the authorities. His miraculous bowling is therefore even more mysterious. He can make the ball spin and drift in extraordinary ways, and on the basis of raw talent alone. There is no one in Twirlymen capable of this because of Rajan’s emphasis on the earnest hard work that comes with the constant search for more rip, flight, or turn.

The legend of Pradeep Mathew succeeds because of Karunatilaka’s skill in setting his fictional spinner in context. He is a teammate of real players, some of whom are named (Muttiah Muralitharan, Arjuna Ranatunga), some of whom are alluded to (The GLOB, i.e., Great Lankan Opening Batsman). Many a curious reader will be confused as to whether Mathew is a real player, such is the slipperiness of Chinaman. His fictionality is a shame, simply for a scene in which he engages in a hilarious discussion with a thinly disguised Geoffrey Boycott (described only as “The Yorkshireman”), in which he makes one of the most pompous figures in the game look ridiculous thanks to the speed and venom of his tongue:

Mathew dispensed with the smile… “New Zealand took twenty years to win first test. Sri Lanka only took three years.”
The Yorkshireman smirks. “That may be the case, but…”
Mathew’s voice rose a key. “England has played for hundred years…”
“But we’re not talking history, are we son?”
“…and they’re still crap.”
“Is that right? You think you’re better than England, do ya?”
“I’m better than you ever were.”
The Yorkshireman raised his eyebrows and gave his lopsided smile… “You think you’ll play the next game, son? Or will you be carrying drinks again?” There was silence. Reggie watched Mathew look up at his bully.
“You think you’ll ever do commentary? Or will you be doing CatchoftheMatch again?”

Wije’s tongue is rather less dextrous and rather more furry thanks to his conspicuous consumption of arrack. He is phenomenally disorganised—attempting to assemble a book on Mathew based on the scraps of information that he is able to glean from a shady cast of characters, each of whom operates with their own (often unspecified) agendas. This disorganisation is reflected in the form of Chinaman, which is assembled from short paragraphs on the basic rules of cricket; transcripts of interviews; notes that Wije has made, lost, and found again; recollections of broken promises made to his long-suffering wife, Sheila; and debates he has held with his best friend, Ari. This technique makes it easy for the truth to slip between the cracks. As readers, we are reliant on Wije’s interpretation of Mathew and the evidence that he chooses to show us, just as a batsman is reliant on a spinner’s clues about what sort of ball he is about to face.

There is enough to suggest that we should trust Karunatilaka’s wobbly protagonist: he sees beauty and takes joy in the game of cricket, and spinning in particular. This is a joy that we must share in. By eliminating physical attributes, spin bowling is a great leveller, and there is little that is more satisfying on a field than defeating a batsman with a wily and well-executed plan. Geniuses like Mathew, Murali, and Tich Freeman may possess uncommon control and dexterity, but for the rest of us, good spinning remains a dark art of subterfuge.

Mike Jakeman graduated in 2006 with a BA in English from Keble College, Oxford. He now works for the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Sam Lipsyte
The Ask
Old Street Publishing, 2011
304 Pages
£7.99
ISBN 978-1906964573

Gary Shteyngart
Super Sad True Love Story
Granta Books, 2010
272 Pages
£12.99
ISBN 978-1847081032

The noughties were a bad time for US morale. The decade began with a bubble bursting on a series of dot-com follies and ended with a housing crisis that left entire towns deserted and the national debt spiralling. In between was a hitherto unimaginable attack on the financial heart of the nation, a sullying of the country’s international reputation through two hugely unpopular foreign wars, the destruction of one of the nation’s best-loved cities by a hurricane, and the inexorable economic rise of a rival to its status as the world’s biggest superpower. Given this litany of misery, the election of the first black president stands out as an anomaly, a rare moment in which Americans were granted the privilege of optimism. The somewhat inevitable response from members of the literary community is humour, but only of the darkest variety. Post-noughties New York novels The Ask by Sam Lipsyte and Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart poke around in the ashes of a decade to see whether there is any flicker of a flame—even a glowing ember?—left in the American dream.

The signs aren’t good. Lipsyte’s protagonist, Milo Burke, is a straightforward everyman figure, a middle-class Queens-dweller living in the period of “late capitalism”. Unfortunately for the future of America, he is also a hopeless loser. Let go from his job as a development officer at a mediocre university, through a lack of motivation he slots straight into a new role as a stay-at-home dad, beholden to the notes left by his frustrated wife, Maura (“Call if there’s a problem. Please don’t have a problem.”). Lacking the imagination to start again, his plan consists solely of recovering his old job. Through a series of unlikely plot twists he finds himself with a shot at redemption. All he has to do is investigate Don Charboneau, the illegitimate son of a fantastically wealthy college buddy, Purdy Stuart. Purdy is concerned that Don, a wounded veteran of the second Iraq war, is about to expose the identity of Purdy’s father, and he wants some prior warning.

If this sounds rather thin, one suspects Lipsyte may concur. His plot is simply a series of fictional triggers that allow his characters to bump into each other and riff on his real interest, the superficiality of modern middle-class American life. Milo’s and Maura’s travails in getting their 3-year-old son educated are a prime example. The experiential learning of the Happy Salamander nursery appeals to them as left-wingers, although the “idealistic and adamantine young educators” with “a smug ideological tinge about them, a minor Red Brigades vibe” hints at an unhappy pretension. It comes as no surprise, then, when the Salamanders stick “a hand-scrawled sign over the door” that reads “Closed indefinitely due to pedagogical conflicts”. When Milo asks about the possibility of a refund on his fees, the founder responds: “This isn’t about money, okay? The whole project has been ripped apart. There are former colleagues out there spreading intolerable lies about our methodologies…And you’re worried about reimbursement?”

The shadow of the war in Iraq looms over the novel in the tragic figure of Don, shuffling around his Jackson Heights apartment on his titanium legs. This causes the “pedagogical conflicts” of a Queens nursery to appear even more absurd, although it also clear that the war is not the sole reason for US decline. Purdy’s drinking hole, The Best Place, is “one of those establishments that signalled the end of empire, or perhaps the advent of something better than empire, at least to those who could afford it”; when a whole subway train is held at a station in order for paramedics to resuscitate a man suffering a stroke, Milo says, only half-jokingly, “We were losing our superpower superpowers. Would they stop this train in China?”

Due more to luck rather than skill, Milo is able to return to his job of asking rich men for money. Such requests are part of the fabric of everyday life in Super Sad True Love Story. Set in the very near future, New York bends over backwards to welcome the new master of the universe, the Chinese Central Banker. Shteyngart’s New York has become a second-rate place; the inertia of The Ask has progressed into irreversible urban decay. Central Park has been transformed into a neo-Hooverville, a temporary home for the foreclosed. The dollar has slumped and is now pegged to the dominant yuan. Oscar Niemeyer’s UN Headquarters, now redundant, has been given a new lease of life as the UN Retail Corridor. The army is at war with a resurgent Venezuela. The city’s inhabitants live in a social media wonderland, where all-encompassing iPhone-type gadgets called “äppäräts” broadcast their owners’ profiles, including their credit rating and perceived “fuckability”.

Unlike Milo, Shteyngart’s protagonist Lenny Abramov is not a symptom of his society’s ills, but is another familiar literary device—a man out of time. The son of Russian immigrants, Lenny is the most unfashionable thing he could be in the New York of the near future: a sentimentalist. Not for him fuckability ratings and a girl who works in media: he believes in the old-fashioned concept of true love and the antiquated hobby of reading books, objects whose physical form now provokes widespread revulsion (“I noticed that some of the first-class people were staring me down for having an open book. ‘Dude, that thing smells like wet socks.’”). His overflowing emotions find a target in a young Korean woman named Eunice Park. Their subsequent relationship becomes a tug-of-war between old and new, overweight and lithe, his synthetic fabrics and her onionskin jeans and TotalSurrender panties. The symbol of hope for the US is that Eunice’s own insecurities are such that she is willing to look through Lenny’s physical inadequacies in a society whose obsession with youth that is more acute than even our own. That this is extinguished by an intervention by Lenny’s boss, a 70-year-old Dorian Gray figure, feels inevitable, as civil war breaks out on the streets of Manhattan.

A frequent failing levelled at a host of dystopian novels is that the future that they portray subsequently turns out to be false, and as such they become dated and somehow irrelevant. Should the current US administration improve the reputation of its country in the Arab world and in Asia, and stimulate the domestic job market, the United States of Super Sad True Love Story could, in a decade, read like pessimism of the most ill-grounded kind. However, the real purpose of dystopian novels is to show us the anxieties of today. Fiction writers are not soothsayers, but they are expected to be skilled at reflecting the world that they see around them. Yet both novels strike a discordant note that it would be remiss not to touch upon. Given that the beloved country is going to hell in a handbasket, both books are written with remarkable wit and vibrancy. Dialogue and observations fizz off the page in such an irrepressible manner that dystopia seems like a bit of a riot (the good kind). Shteyngart and Lipsyte write dystopian novels in the way that they ought to be read; they are not performing the last rites over the corpse of the United States, but are using stylistic verve to write the cautionary tales that they hope will ensure its survival.

Mike Jakeman graduated in 2006 with a BA in English from Keble College, Oxford. He now works for the Economist Intelligence Unit.

As a result of record companies’ continual search for something new to grab listeners’ attention, pop musicians now come in all shapes and sizes, and from every different background. Notable acts to have emerged in the last year include an Italian-American with a passion for Rilke (Lady GaGa), a Sri Lankan Tamil rapper (M.I.A.), and most famously, an ordinary middle-aged woman from West Lothian (Susan Boyle). Frequently, this diversity is a cause for celebration, as it suggests that music fans listen without prejudice. This makes all the more surprising the hostile reactions to an American band playing at this weekend’s Glastonbury: Vampire Weekend.

The group, singer Ezra Koenig, multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij, bass player Chris Baio, and drummer Chris Tomson, look conservative and inoffensive, the sort of young men who might work for Google. Like so many other bands, Vampire Weekend was formed at college, but the band’s alma mater happened to be the Columbia University in New York, part of the prestigious Ivy League. Musically, the group combines the clean and crisp guitars of the British New Wave with a sprinkling of African and Latin American sounds and instruments. The pop sensibility of the former means that the songs are catchy; the novelty of hearing the latter makes the band stand out. The group’s eponymous debut album, released in 2008, was a runaway commercial success, selling over 500,000 copies in the United States. Their sophomore effort, 2010′s Contra, reached number one in the United States and number three in the United Kingdom. However, both albums, and the band as a whole, have polarised fans and critics.

Vampire Weekend’s lyrics, which often delight in obscure etymology (“Walk to class/In front of you/Spilled kefir/On your keffiyeh”), give the first hint of why the band has proved so divisive. Their confidence of their fit within an intellectual hot-house hasn’t helped (“Raggedy wisdom falls from my hand/As the ladies of Cambridge know who I am”), nor has their description of their sound as “Upper West Side Soweto”. For Spin’s Andy Greenwald, Koenig’s willingness to cherry-pick from sounds from all over the globe is obnoxious: “He seems to possess encyclopaedic knowledge of every major era of pop music…but he speaks in a clinical, removed way, as if it were all a glorious steam table that had been laid out specifically for him to feast upon”; Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber sees the band as “globe-trotting sons of distinguished men clumsily exploring different cultures, despite being passively, naively invested”; while Village Voice smelt “the putrescent stench of old money, of old politics, of old-guard high society” coming from the group’s debut album.

These comments, particularly Greenwald’s, reveal that in spite of the wild popularity of shows like The X Factor and American Idol, which demonstrate how unashamedly calculated the music business can be, listeners still like musicians to be authentic, people who sing or start bands because of some pre-ordained talent or drive, those who were born to do it. To its detractors, Vampire Weekend is the polar opposite. Its members are boys with sensible college degrees who have a world of opportunity open to them, which they have rejected in favour of adventures in the crowded and cut-throat pop industry. No matter how prejudiced the view, its angry repetition by critics and listeners has revealed that music is still regarded as something that should be a destiny rather than a career option.

Furthermore, the Ivy League degrees and the (incorrect) assumption that the band hail from privileged, WASP-y backgrounds seems to have made Vampire Weekend’s interest in world music more unpalatable. Schreiber is accusing the band of an imperialistic cultural appropriation, of sucking the blood out of foreign musical styles without paying due deference. Beyond the inverse snobbery of such a comment, this is an anachronistic view. One of the consequences of our shrunken, globalised world is that we now have greater and easier access to music from each of its corners. If this flowed in only one direction, enabling the Ezra Koenigs of the United States to plunder the sounds of distant lands, Schreiber may have a point. However, cultural appropriation is practised by everybody, from the Tuareg nomads of North Africa, who have picked up the electric guitars of the West and used them to play songs about their desire for political freedom, to the aforementioned M.I.A., whose electro-rap combines sounds from at least five continents.

More relevant to Vampire Weekend is the idea of trans-cultural diffusion. It is because of its widespread appropriation that African music is having a moment in Europe and the United States, with acts, such as Amadou and Mariam, Tinariwen and Staff Benda Bilili, receiving greater attention in the media (and selling more records) as a result of their influence on a new generation of bands, typified by Vampire Weekend. After listening to African music filtered through the brains of Koenig and his peers, listeners are investigating the source material. However, Koenig himself has taken this line of argument further. Not only does he reject claims of appropriation (“the two main writers in the band are Jewish and Persian…We’re certainly not all fresh off the Mayflower”), he doesn’t feel like an agent of diffusion as much as a product of it: “We’re in a context that’s coming after instances of people actually stealing from each other.”

He has a point: the invention of the sampler, for instance, has meant that musicians can lift, steal, and appropriate from each other more easily than ever before, while the Internet allows music to be distributed further and faster. It is no longer a shock to hear two hitherto unconnected pieces of music, even those from different continents, stuck together as something new. But this fails to explain why Vampire Weekend, in particular, has proved so provocative. The reason behind it may be surprisingly simple. From the early days of Merseybeat, to punk and then rave, pop has always stretched the boundaries of taste and acceptability. Its edginess has been a critical part of its appeal to young listeners. But the music and images of these eras have since been absorbed into the canon, diminishing their power to shock. John Lydon (the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten) has become a reality TV regular, while it now seems inconceivable that The Prodigy’s Keith Flint was once considered a threat to society. The perennial search for something new that has thrown up both Lady GaGa and Susan Boyle shows how diverse the musical landscape has become. However, the reception received by Vampire Weekend has shown that listeners are still uncomfortable with music as a career option. The marrying of rock with education and opportunity shows there is one taboo that still has to be broken down: there is still prejudice against preppiness in pop.

Mike Jakeman graduated in 2006 with a BA in English from Keble College, Oxford. He now works for the Economist Intelligence Unit.

James Shapiro
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
Faber and Faber, 2010
384 Pages
£20.99
ISBN 978-0571235766

Stanley Wells
Shakespeare, Sex and Love
Oxford University Press, 2010
282 Pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-0199578597

It is always useful to remind ourselves of how little we know about William Shakespeare. Despite his status as the most famous playwright in the English language, much of his life is a mystery. In his book on the person behind the plays, Stephen Greenblatt notes the “abundant but thin” evidence of Shakespeare’s life. The primary sources that have survived are mostly administrative—a marriage licence, christening records, tax bills, affidavits, the odd cast list, and a will—the cumulative effect of which is to make Shakespeare seem “a drabber, duller person” than the one that we imagine from the exuberance of his plays.

Ironically, this dearth of biographical detail has not deterred literary critics as much as liberated them. It is, after all, easier to speculate, often wildly, on a shadowy subject than on one whose life is well documented. The result has been an extraordinary volume of criticism: British Library records reveal that over 2,000 books on Shakespeare were published in the last ten years, or a little over four each week. Another two works can now be added to this tottering pile, by two heavyweight Shakespeare scholars: James Shapiro and Stanley Wells. Their subjects—authorship and sex—are among the most contentious and well trodden areas of Shakespeare studies, but the authors shared approach is to show the necessity of reading the Bard in the context of his age.

The cover of Shapiro’s Contested Will, which shows a rogue’s gallery of Elizabethan dramatists and courtiers and asks us “Who Wrote Shakespeare?”, is a red herring; Shapiro is less interested in examining the credibility of each of the contenders than considering why particular men were championed when they were. This proves to be a fertile approach, and a useful position from which to question the theories of those who argue that Francis Bacon (the “Baconians”) was the real Shakespeare, and those who contest that the Bard was really Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (the “Oxfordians”).

But why doubt Shakespeare as an author at all? Shapiro identifies the source of the authorship debate in the writing of Edmond Malone, a Georgian-era Shakespeare scholar, who, frustrated by the lack of evidence available to write a biography of Shakespeare, wondered if the works themselves might hold some clues. Given the size of the Bard’s oeuvre, it is not surprising that Malone spotted parallels between the plays and contemporary knowledge of Shakespeare’s life. Hence the “pathetic lamentations” expressed by Constance at the death of her son, Arthur, in King John, could be a dramatic echo of Shakespeare’s feelings when his own son, Hamnet, died in 1596. Underlying Malone’s thesis was the thought that “he could only write about what he had felt or done rather than heard about, read about, borrowed from other writers or imagined.” If one is to believe this rather dubious assumption, the opposite must also be true—that Shakespeare was incapable of writing about what he had not experienced. It was this leap that began one of literature’s strangest quests: to prove that Shakespeare, our greatest dramatist, did not write his plays after all.

In essays on each of the two major schools, Shapiro, a committed “Stratfordian”, shows how the Baconians and Oxfordians made the same mistake: they were unwittingly influenced by the fashions of their ages, and thus failed to put Shakespeare in the context of his own. The Baconians’ conviction that their man had left verbal clues of his identity hidden in Shakespeare’s works is shown to be a reflection of the 19th century’s interest in sequences and ciphers, following the development of Samuel Morse’s code. Moreover, an unlikely revival of interest in the Oxford theory in the 1970s and 1980s is put in the context of renewed public interest in conspiracies in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination and Watergate.

However outlandish their attempts to discredit Shakespeare might be, Shapiro treats his predecessors with respect. There is something undeniably comic in Shapiro’s description of the mad dash across the Atlantic undertaken by a Baconian, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, who becomes convinced that manuscripts were hidden in Islington’s Canonbury Tower; in her rival Orville Ward Owen’s determination to dredge the Severn river in search of the same item; and in Percy Allen’s attempt to solve the mystery through séances. Yet one suspects that Shapiro gives them more credence than they deserve in order to provide a stiffer opponent for his final essay, a barnstorming piece of rhetoric in which he uses the kind of unglamorous historical research absent from the work of the Baconians and Oxfordians to construct a robust defence of Shakespeare.

Shapiro also calls upon the work of an ally, Stanley Wells, whose work has shown that several of Shakespeare’s works were produced in collaboration with other contemporary dramatists, which has strengthened the Stratfordian claim. Yet although Wells sides with Shapiro on the authorship question, his latest study, Shakespeare, Sex and Love, shows how slippery the arguments can be.

His discussion of the sonnets is key. Given their first-person perspective, they are uniquely valuable to those determined to read Shakespeare autobiographically. While Shapiro is keen to highlight the dangers of assuming that the speaker is Shakespeare, Wells cannot resist speculating. His argument “that some, indeed many of them, reflect circumstances of the author’s own emotional and sexual life” is threefold: the poems are believed to have been written at the height of the craze for sonnet sequences in the 1590s, but were not published until much later, in 1609, suggesting that they were an expression of something personal rather than an attempt to cash in on a literary trend; second, the break with the tradition of addressing sequences to fictitious romantic lovers (such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Stella) by naming the protagonist after himself; and finally the unintelligibility of the events that are recorded in the poems, which suggests Shakespeare was purposefully being elusive and concealing details from his readers.

This groundwork laid, Wells goes a step further to ask, “If we read the sonnets in autobiographical terms, what do they tell us? One, they show us that he [Shakespeare] was indeed, and probably frequently, unfaithful to his wife.” (When reading this, it might be possible to hear the muffled thud of Shapiro banging his head on his desk in frustration.) Wells takes a step back from the debate in his conclusion, where he admits to the impossibility of sifting “the imagined from the real”, but his delight in projecting a vision of Shakespeare through the prism of his poetry shows the enduring appeal of the authorship debate.

Elsewhere, Shakespeare, Sex and Love is a breezy jaunt through the sexual highs and lows of the Renaissance. As is required for such a subject, Wells is an unflinching guide, as happy to discuss pederasty as Polonius. His early chapters on what was considered acceptable sexual behaviour (just about everything, it seems) are a riot, and he avoids the all too common pitfall of putting Shakespeare on a moral pedestal. Wells is not naïve enough to suggest that Shakespeare must have participated in all of the sexual practices that appear in his plays, but he is gossipy enough to reprint several enjoyable rumours about the Bard’s virility. This is probably the greatest contrast in the authors’ approaches: Shapiro’s prose is taut and rhetorical, Wells’s flabbier and more divergent.

Where Wells and Shapiro are united is the belief that declarations of love and desire in Shakespeare can be literary devices, rather than personal confessions. Wells quotes one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Thomas Nashe, who suggests that the sonnet was used as a form of verbal jousting, while Shapiro cites the example of Giles Fletcher, a middle-aged courtier who wrote in the rather different voice of a love-struck youth. This shows the difficulty faced by any scholar in trying to disprove Shakespeare’s authorship through his texts. Even if the Bard’s own voice could be detected, it would be impossible to prove that he was speaking of his own feelings. This points to the ultimate futility of centuries of autobiographical readings of Shakespeare. The frustrating disconnection between his humdrum, demonstrable life of christenings, taxes, and courts and the extraordinary imagination that is evident on the page will remain. Despite the best efforts of future generations of literary grave-diggers, Shakespeare will continue to be more ghost than man.

Mike Jakeman graduated in 2006 with a BA in English from Keble College, Oxford. He now works for the Economist Intelligence Unit.

John Lanchester
Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay
Allen Lane, 2010
240 Pages
£20
ISBN 978-1846142857

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…

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If it is possible for anyone to have benefited from the global financial crisis, then book publishers may have a stronger claim than most. Understanding the crisis as it unfolded was almost impossible, given the speed with which a series of monumental events occurred, the amount of new terminology that suddenly sprang up, and the fact that not even those in the stricken banks, building societies, and insurers (never mind the industry regulators and their respective governments) seemed to have a clue what was going on.

In the 18 months since the crisis reached its peak, canny publishers have bailed out befuddled readers with a plethora of new books on the subject, ranging in tone from the sardonic (F.I.A.S.C.O.—note the sardonic use of acronyms) to the self-flagellating (Confessions of a Sub-Prime Lender). Given the number of titles, choosing the right tour guide to pick through the debris of the ruined financial landscape can seem an onerous task. It makes sense to choose one of the (surprisingly few) commentators who suggested that such a catastrophe was possible. As such, Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett has emerged from the crisis with her reputation enhanced, and her book, Fool’s Gold, has become the set text on the subprime crisis.

However, another less obvious figure can also claim to have seen what was coming. A novelist by trade, John Lanchester was drawn to the City as a possible setting for a new piece of fiction. Instead, struck by the lack of understanding of modern finance (he describes the City as equivalent to “a far-off country of which we know little”), he dug a bit deeper. He discovered how a combination of mathematical ingenuity and blind-eyed regulation had resulted in the widespread use of financial instruments that were capable of delinking bankers from the risk inherent in their investments. In an essay for the London Review of Books in January 2008 he showed how this moral hazard led to the run on Northern Rock, and concluded that “if our laws are not extended to control the new kinds of super-powerful, super-complex and potentially super-risky investment vehicles, they will one day cause a financial disaster of global-systemic proportions.”

Within nine months, Lanchester enjoyed the dubious pleasure of being proved right. His latest book, Whoops!, extends the argument of his original essay, plotting the entire course of the crisis, from its origins (which he locates, contentiously, in the collapse of communism in Europe at the end of the 1980s) to the range of unhappy options we face in financing the cost of the bailouts and stimulus. Within 200 pages he manages to cover the behaviour of bankers, governments, regulators, consumers, and even money itself, each of which, he argues, was an important factor in the crisis. Lanchester’s position as a City outsider enables him to adopt the pose of an outraged everyman, as aghast at the more sensational elements of the crisis as his imagined reader, the average taxpayer on the street.

Whoops! aims to break down the complicated elements of the crisis so they can be understood by everyone. Lanchester’s description of the mystery of the City also hints at another, loftier aim: that of making the country’s financial centre less obscure, in the hope that bankers will then be made to be more accountable. To make the economics less daunting, however, Lanchester fills the book with heavy-handed references to pop culture. It seems a stretch to link the financial crisis to The Wire, The Simpsons, and Zoo and Heat magazines, and so it proves. This is a shame, because Lanchester is not only capable of explaining complex financial operations, he excels at it. His coverage of derivatives, an instrument so misunderstood that it broke the entire banking system, is cleverly explained in terms of personal finance, and is delivered with such clarity that it should be photocopied and stuck to the desks of every new investment banker.

Yet this is not to suggest that Whoops! is a dry read. Lanchester’s incredulous response to the crisis is most effective and entertaining when he comes across moments of true absurdity; moments when it seemed that the whole industry had become so focused on maximising profits and divorcing itself from risk that it threatened to separate from reality entirely and float off into space. There are plenty of these moments, but three stand out. First, Lanchester describes how in 2000 the US Congress was so seduced by the country’s banking sector that it passed legislation to exempt credit-default swaps (CDSs, contracts whereby the buyer assumes the risk of the seller defaulting on its debt in exchange for a fee) from the kind of regulation that is applied to other, similar instruments, such as options and futures. It also guaranteed that CDSs could continue to be traded over the counter, rather than through a monitored exchange. The result was the Commodity Futures Modernisation Act, “a law that actually banned legislation”.

Another is the development of securitisation, which enables swaps that contain different levels of risk to be grouped together and sold. By interspersing high-risk investments with safer ones, the sting is supposedly taken out. The result was a whole new market for lenders, as investments that were previously considered too risky to touch could now be reconsidered. Suddenly, the age-old relationship between lender and borrower was reversed. Potential homeowners no longer went to the bank for a mortgage, the bank came to them, and it came in the hope of signing them up to unusually high interest rates so that the debt that they had created could be pooled and sold on. That there was no accounting for what might happen if the new owners couldn’t pay leaves Lanchester “reeling with incredulity”.

The third moment was a change in the way that ratings agencies were funded. Before the mid-1970s, ratings that assessed the riskiness of different types of debt were accessed through a subscription service. However, the US regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, decided that the debt-issuer should pay the agency for its ratings. This meant that the more ratings the agency produced, the more it earned. In addition, agencies were paid three times as much for assessing mortgage-backed securities as for regular corporate bonds. Furthermore, “the banks were not shy about saying that if an agency would not give them the rating they wanted, they would go shopping elsewhere.” Unsurprisingly, this led to the highest grades being awarded to the riskiest debt, a complete perversion of the rating system.

Lanchester’s pose as an outraged taxpayer enables him to examine the crisis from almost every angle, but he is weaker on possible macroeconomic factors. The idea that sub-prime mortgages were only made possible thanks to a prolonged spell of low US interest rates, which in turn was enabled by the purchase of enormous amounts of US government debt by China, is dismissed in a couple of paragraphs, although he does confess that the China-US relationship “gives me the willies”. In fact, part of the trap that befell US house buyers is that low interest rates caused house prices to rise, which meant that buyers not only had to take on bigger mortgages, but also that property came to be regarded as a risk-free investment. Both of these are among the many factors responsible for the crisis. To lay the blame, however, at the door of Asian central bankers for failing to encourage consumption instead of saving would run counter to Lanchester’s argument. For him, the crisis is an indication of the need to re-examine Western ideology and to learn to recognise when we have had ‘enough’. The motivation to do this is provided by this concise but stirring account of the crisis.

Mike Jakeman graduated in 2006 with a BA in English from Keble College, Oxford. He now works for the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The decision to award the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama was met with widespread surprise and confusion from the world’s media. The most plausible interpretation of the accolade was that the Nobel committee was eager to motivate Mr Obama and to remind him of how much he could achieve. In Africa, a Sudanese-born British entrepreneur, Mo Ibrahim, is trying a similar motivational trick, but with a prize even more lucrative than Mr Obama’s Nobel.

In 2007, Mr Ibrahim used a fortune made from selling mobile phones to create the Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. Worth over $5 million, the Ibrahim Prize is available every year to an African leader who has exemplified good governance. The size of the prize has given the Ibrahim Foundation plenty of headlines, but the implicit assumption that financial reward is the best way to nurture African leadership has not stimulated the debate that it should. Africa is a continent full of infant democracies, and there is great danger in encouraging its people to see wealth as a consequence of electoral success.

Yet wealth is what the prize provides. An Ibrahim Prize laureate receives the $5 million over an initial ten years, followed by an annual bursary of $200,000 for life and $200,000 for ten years for charitable purposes. The criteria for consideration are, as one would hope, fairly rigorous. Eligibility is restricted to those who have been democratically elected, have served their terms within the limits of their country’s constitution, and have left office within the preceding three years. The prize-giving committee is also appropriately heavyweight: members have included former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maarti Ahtisaari, and the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei.

The purpose of the Ibrahim Prize is twofold. Although it exists primarily to reward those whose work and dedication deserve greater recognition, the prize also works as an incentive to those currently in power. Mr Ibrahim has made the point that African leaders often lack the opportunities—such as speaking engagements and authorship—available to retired Western politicians. However, if the prize gains sufficient international prestige, its winners may also enjoy greater status and access to post-retirement benefits. Failing that, in a time of global economic certainty, the possibility of a $5 million nest-egg ought to be enough to catch the eye.

This, however, is the first point of contention. If a leader is determined to have more funds at his disposal, it is difficult to imagine that the hope of future recognition from Mr Ibrahim would prevent him from indulging in the more traditional practices of corruption and embezzlement. Quite simply, $5 million is peanuts to a leader who is serious about getting rich illegally. (A former leader of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mobutu Sese Soko, was widely reported to have had billions stashed in European bank accounts, as did several other heads of state, such as Omar Bongo of Gabon and Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo.) The size of the award hints that it wishes to do more than reward, but it is not big enough to guarantee its effectiveness as an alternative incentive.

Beyond these practical concerns, the Ibrahim Prize begs a more ethical question about the validity of rewarding someone—and not just anyone, but an elected official—so handsomely for doing their job. This is no doubt a point with which Mr Ibrahim would quibble, pointing out that his two laureates to date, Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique and Festus Mogae of Botswana, have demonstrated much more than the mere ability to operate within the confines of democracy and resist plundering the treasury. Mr Mogae was cited for his ability to develop and diversify the economy while combating HIV; Mr Chissano received the prize for his commitment to democracy in the immediate aftermath of a civil war. On the whole, though, Africa has been hampered by two generations of post-independence leaders who abused their positions by rigging elections and hiding money abroad. The main weapon to combat the autocratic tendencies of African leaders is democracy, and the Ibrahim Prize aims to reward those who abide by the ballot box.

Yet the size of the award and the fact that it is given to an individual (and not his country) effectively undermine the democratic process. The Ibrahim Prize contributes to a problem that African countries have faced since independence: the concentration of power among the elite. The idea of the Big Man leader who oppresses the political opposition, lives extravagantly on plunder from natural resources, and surrounds himself with a corrupt coterie is becoming anachronistic. But it is also a reminder of the dangers of giving any single person or group too much influence. Awarding a prize to a head of state implies a level of control over a society that democracy attempts to limit. It would be grossly unfair to suggest that the Ibrahim Prize could result in—or even encourage—another generation of Big Men, but it is hard to shake the notion that an award meant to benefit the continent should emphasize rule by the many, not an individual leader.

When choosing its third laureate in October, the committee faced a difficult decision. Of the most high-profile candidates, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria should have been ruled out when he unsuccessfully attempted to change the constitution and run for a third term. South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki was also eligible, but the lasting impressions of his presidency–his bizarre and damaging views on AIDS and his unwillingness to rebuke Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe–cast doubt on his leadership. Many commentators believed that this situation would clear the way for John Kufuor of Ghana, but his administration was hampered by rumours of corruption. Moreover, he is already handsomely rewarded by a hefty state pension.

Given these options, the foundation made the decision not to award its prize to anyone. This has always been a possibility—Mr Ibrahim has referred to the fact that the prize is not necessarily annual—but the decision still seemed antithetical to the foundation’s aims, not least because the decision prompted a blizzard of negative press coverage. Newspapers in the UK responded with pieces titled “Does anyone govern well in Africa?”, “No-one worthy” and “African ‘good leader’ award fails to find winner”. Headlines like these reinforce negative stereotypes about African governance and work against Mr Ibrahim’s goals.

Ultimately, though, Mr Ibrahim’s decision was as correct as it was unexpected. Recognizing the paucity of good governance rather than lauding an unworthy winner affirmed the foundation’s integrity, reinforced its independence, and disproved suggestions of inter-African cronyism. The decision also hints at the foundation’s wider aim to be a tool for African self-assessment—one willing both to praise and to rebuke.

In planning the evolution of the Ibrahim Prize, the foundation could do worse than follow the model of the Nobel committee, which has managed to subordinate the financial prize to the status of the award itself. To this end, the Ibrahim Foundation should reduce the value of its prize, which is grotesquely large as a pension but far too small to counteract corruption. The committee should also award the prize less frequently, raising the standard of its laureates and increasing its international prestige. These steps would allay the suspicion that the prize serves only to make richer the continent’s richest men.

Mike Jakeman graduated in 2006 with a degree in English from Keble College, Oxford. He now works for the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Photograph © Ibrahim Foundation