Michael W Jackson – Page 127 – Political theory and practice

‘The 27th Day’ (1957)

A low-key science fiction movie about, oh um, the end of the world. The set-up is interesting, but it limps in the middle and reaches a puzzling conclusion.

27Day Poster.jpg A misleading lobby poster. There are no zapping flying saucers chasing Valerie French in a bathing suit.

Gene Barry with his experience in outwitting Martians from the red planet at the height of the Cold War in ‘The War of the Worlds’ (1953) is here, sporting a RAF moustache that looks so fake that we knew it would have to go and it did. Arnold Moss as the alien is so effortlessly grave that … [on him more at the end].

Five individuals from around the world – Chinese, Russian, American, Brit, and Dutch – are plucked from their routine and plonked into plastic chairs in a bland conference room looking very modernistic though not modern. There is nothing special about them, one a villager, another a sentry, a press hack, a sunbather, and a scientist. With gender diversity the Chinese and the Brit are women. The Dutch scientist is in fact visiting the United States, so that gives Uncle Sam two.

After having proven to the gathering that they are on a spaceship, Arnold Moss presents the dilemma. His planet is doomed and the population must relocate. These are planetary asylum seekers. The Third Rock will do nicely, but being pacifists, they cannot conquer though it is evident that their technology is far superior. Even big Gort seems a clumsy relic against Moss’s magic.
27 DAy.jpg You have the power! (An early iPhone advertisement?)

Apparently, neither can they negotiate. Instead Arnie will give each of the five a weapon (the size of an iPhone) that cam destroy their enemies. Note, it destroys only persons and not material. It works by thought control. If these weapons are not used by the end of the 27th day, the aliens will look elsewhere for suitable real estate and leave Earth alone, and the weapons will become useless. The explanation of the weapons is as detailed and as incomprehensible as McKinsey-speak but it covered every contingency the screenwriters could imagine, however, there is no manual for those who were not paying attention.

Knowing Earth history, it seems the aliens assume that some or all of the weapons will be used, and in effect that will depopulate the planet for their immigration. Rather like the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War stopping short of Paris, leaving the French there to murder each other and to save ammunition. Cynical. But then look at the news today.

During the briefing, Gene Barry gets the phone number of the English woman, clad in a bathing suit because she was plucked from the beach (hence the poster above), and then ‘Hey, presto!’ they are right back where they came from. She promptly throws her device into the sea, telephones Gene, and flies to LAX. She certainly has initiative and tenacity.

The Chinese woman, who says not a word and has no close-up, commits suicide. This seems to be in reaction to the massacre of her village which was underway when she was alien-napped. The cadre were practicing on the helots, they way they do.

The Soviet sentry is dumbfounded and keeps his mouth shut.
The Dutch scientist is on his way to a conference in New York City to which he now travels. Thus there are three possessors of this doomsday weapon and two of the devices are Stateside.

Sitting tight is not an option, because ….. Spoiler.

Because alien Arnold Moss goes on the air around the world on every radio and television channel in every language, he is more of media hog than the Twit in Chief. He tells everyone about the weapons and names the five who possess them. Cover blown! He had not told the five that he was going to rat them out like that!

The Feds latch onto the Dutchman as he lands at La Guardia.

Barry, having peeled off that moustache, thus disguised he grabs the Brit bit at LAX before the Forces of Order spot her, and together they head off to a hideout he just happens to know. (Probably cased it when dealing with those pesky Martians earlier.)

Pause for thought. Five randomly picked individuals have a doomsday weapon in their pockets. What will they do with them? That is one interesting proposition. Some will see parallels with the New Testament; I did.
Individual choice is quickly compromised by the public broadcast of their names. The Soviet grunt is arrested, suborned, tortured, but remains silent for a time. His motivation is left a blank. In the end, rather than see the weapon used he commits suicide by throwing himself out of an upper story window.

Barry and his girl puzzle over what to do in their hideout. The Dutchman, like the Soviet, keeps the secret…for a time. Though he is pressured relentlessly by the CIA operatives, but none of his inquisitors brought a waterboard.

The second interesting proposition concerns how others react. That an alien is at work becomes accepted by authorities and the public at large. The five individuals are then seen in the ensuing panic to be agents of the alien with Rush Limbaugh-like hysteria laid on. Imagine that! A man bearing a resemblance to Barry, remember that mo, is murdered by a mob. Add Faux News to that equation and the lynchings would be general.

Barry’s idea is to sit out the twenty-seven days, and by some miracle he and his squeeze seem to have enough provisions in the two bottomless grocery store paper bags they have to survive for the duration (of the film) undetected. Until….

Yes, the Soviet grunt finally cracks and the weapon is now available to the USSR, which promptly proclaims it to blackmail the USA to pull out of Europe and Asia. Uncle Sam complies.

This turn of events brings patriot Barry and Valerie out of hiding in the hour of need. The Western Alliance of the American Barry, the Brit bit, an the Dutch professor stall but time is running out. The Russkies know that the weapon will lapse at the end the twenty-seventh day so if it is to be used then it must be before then. To prevent a retaliation from the weapon(s) in the USA, the best time to use is just before expiration. The Cold War context weighs heavily throughout.

Meanwhile, Barry and company test the iPhone weapon app and it does indeed work. Ergo the compliance noted above.

But the professor has a trick or two up his academic gown. When Moss handed over the devices he said it has ‘the power of life and death.’ Significant that? He did not say ‘life or death.’ This egghead applies himself to re-programming the devices with his big brain so as to kill only ‘the enemies of freedom.’ Wow!
We all have candidates for that hit list. Think of whom Ayn Rand would put on that list. Try not to think of Rush Limbaugh. Try harder!

Ayn Rand.jpg Ayn Rand

As the clock ticks and the Soviets prepare to activate the weapon app, the professor does his stuff and … that is it. ‘The enemies of freedom’ die! How easy was that! Lots of Russkies pile up in the streets.

In the aftermath at the United Nations there is an expansive spirit of unity of those who made the cut and Barry suggests offering the aliens some help. Maybe they could inhabit the parts of the Earth that are uninhabitable. The Antarctic is mentioned. New Jersey near the Kardashians seems logical? Some nice real estate in the Gobi Desert can be had for a price. This message is broadcast, and on the eighth ring Arnold Moss answers and rather than accept the offer instead welcomes the Earth into the community of 30,000 worlds! Whoa!

Huh? Was this some kind of fraternity initiation? That seemed to be the conclusion invited by Moss’s last remarks. Such a test for admission is a common theme in sci-fi but here it is explained no further.

The film drags in the middle with Barry and the Brit in the hideout listening to the radio. The minutes seemed like hours to them and to me, too. The whole exercise would have been much better in a half-hour Twilight Zone or Science Fiction Theatre episode.

A few notes. Two suicides. The voluntary production code that dominated Hollywood at the time forbade suicides in word or deed. Yet there are two here. The Chinese woman early on and the Soviet soldier near the end. Perhaps because they were both commies, they were better dead than red.

Both the women endowed with the weapon reject it. The Chinese throws it on the fire burning the remains of the village before committing Chinese-kari and the Brit throws it into the sea before flying to Hollywood, well, LA. Lesson? Never trust a woman with a weapon of mass destruction.

Moss 27.jpg Arnold Moss (1910-1989)

Moss appeared in ‘The Conscience of the King’ in ‘Star Trek: TOS’ as Karidian the executioner. With his aristocratic bearing, perfect diction, and melliferous baritone voice he always dominated any scene. Something (else) William Shatner complained about. Moss was Phi Beta Kappa with a Columbia PhD who constructed crossword puzzles for the ‘New York Times’ while waiting on sets.

Gervase Phinn, ‘Head over Heels in the Dales’ (2000)

Third in a series of novels about life in the Yorkshire Dales of England: Low key, rural, disarming, and downright charming. The eponymous hero is one Gervase Phinn, school inspector. Some will remember these (in)spectors who were often the object of fear and trembling.
Head over hearls.jpg
Gervase is one of a team of four inspectors presided over by a senior inspector assisted by a secretary. This unit in turn reports to head office at the county. They are employed by the county but work to rules set by the Ministry of Education in distant London. Whatever the organisational chart, they are a small unit within a large organisation, combing the best and worst of each kind of organisation.
The master narrative is Phinn’s life and career. In this entry it is his second year on the job and in these pages he gets married to Christine and they set up house in a ‘builder’s delight’ of a cottage on the Dales, which are lovingly described.

Think of the countryside of ‘All Creatures Great and Small.’ Their efforts to make the cottage habitable are monitored by a neighbour who makes many observations, all of them laconic and most of them ironic, careful always never to lift a finger to help.
At work Phinn visits schools, sits in classrooms, talks to children, and attends one speech day after another. He also participates in staff development exercises at a training centre. The bulk of the novel strings together such episodes, many of which are delightful, as when a five year old girl in a class asks him how to spell ‘sex.’ No spoiler.
At Christmas he sits through four nativity plays in schools as he delivers the end of year reports. Dreary it may sound. Repetitive it may seem. But in the telling it is neither. The four plays are done in different ways, and Phinn, the writer, has the eye and ear for detecting those differences and conveying them to the reader. Wonderful.
At work the senior inspector and head of the unit, Harold, announces that he will take very early retirement in a few months, meanwhile a successor is appointed. In due course a much credentialed new senior inspector is named. Prior to taking up the job he pays several visits to the unit and the county office.
He speaks but McKinsey and talks but key performance indicators.

He bristles with changes and more change, and further change. Everything must change from the colour of ink in the reports to the number of rings of the telephone before answering. Everything must change from the time spent on task to the numerical indicators harvested from audits. Bullet points must replace text and text must replace bullet points. He is a very image of the modern major manager. As much as he is caricature he is also reality. In his hours of consultation, where he does all the talking, he never mentions children, teachers, schools, learning, or education. But the generic McKinsey-speak rolls on, and on. [Pause.]
Each of the members of the unit reacts to him. The Irish woman, Geraldine, is the first to realise the news is bad. Later when they catch on, David and Sidney are stunned into silence, an unusual state for either. Julie, the office secretary starts looking for another job. When this McKinsey clone refers to Connie at the training centre as the janitor, she …. and gets her revenge. She is the building supervisor! And proud of it!
The cast of characters is an amusing lot and given plenty of page time in the manner of all those character actors that enliven Frank Capra movies.
Lest it all seem light as air, note that there are serious moments. When David, with his usual insensitivity makes a stupid, sexist joke concerning unwed teenage mothers, both Geraldine and Connie set him straight in a one-two punch combination.
More than once Phinn is confronted by the conundrum of means and ends. The Ministry requires teachers to keep a tidy classroom, plan every teaching activity two weeks in advance, make written records of each class meeting, involve students in activities in prescribed ways, improve students language use and written expression in measured steps, and so on. This is the administrative approach to teaching much favoured by administrators and ostensibly it is the means to the end of education. Most teachers comply and most are adequate, and nothing more. Consider that approach applied to gardening for a moment to see it weakness. The plants are growing all the time in unplanned ways right now, not two weeks from now. A neat and well organised gardner may nonetheless have a dead garden.
But Gervase encounters in these pages two extraordinary exceptions. The first has a chaotic classroom in which the children do most of the talking as they explain things to each other. The room is untidy. Extremely! There is no plan. But there is excitement, curiosity, focus, learning, engagement, interaction, experimentation, argument, and more which the teacher seems to manage with hints and materials. It is all palpable but ineffable on the pages of the pro forma of the report Phinn must complete. Which is the priority? The Ministry standards or the children’s learning, because they are certainly learning, of that he has no doubt. Hmmm. Of the second deviant teacher there will be more in a moment.
Drafted to speak to a ladies’ club. He meets the president at her home where she orders her husband, Winco she calls him, to and fro like a wind-up toy. She blusters and demands and Winco complies with an amiable ‘Righto’ on each occasion. Phinn finds them both pathetic.
Only later does Phinn realise the Winco has every medal the RAF bestows, Distinguished Service Cross, Battle of Britain Ace, George Cross, two Life Saving ribbons, and others and that ‘Winco’ is short for ‘Wing Commander.’ Still later he learns that this woman was a Air Raid Warden with her own set of medals for pulling people from burning buildings while delivering babies in the rubble with the other hand. Never judge a book by its cover contra Bill Byson who never does anything else.
Gervase visits a Church of England school where all the most delinquent and troublesome students are sent within the high walls around it. Most of the teachers are rugby players. Most go through the motions with the sub-verbal, primeval slime they see as their students but are well organised with pristine paperwork. Phinn is shadowing one such amoeba who surprises him by her anticipation for the last class of the day, Religion. Huh? Well, he is not sure. She does not seem the sort to be ironic, but she is also difficult to understand mumbling through lip and tongue studs with a thick accent and three-word vocabulary.
Lo and behold! These students who have been indifferent and hostile in every other class that day, are completely rapt in Religion. The instructor goes at the Bible as though it were a football game, narrating the stories and eliciting reactions from the bleachers, and react they do! With four-letter words unusable for a family blog like this. Pontius Pilate gets a right barracking! At the end, they file out arguing about their reactions of events just unfolded. Engaged they are! Learning they have been, but how to square that with the Ministry pro forma? That is the question.
Gervase Phinn
The book ends with a school fete and a verse reciting contest which Phinn must judge. His previous experiences at judging were none to happy. However deservingly obvious is the winner, the others have parents with a great deal to say. It is climatic, and great fun.

‘Gypsy’ (1999) by J. Robert Janes

It is Occupied Paris 1943, and a series of robberies demand the attention of the luckless duo of Louis St Cyr and Hermann Kohler. The robberies are bold, vast, and deft. But this is no mere thief because fatal booby traps have been left behind to discourage police investigation. Stealing millions of francs from a metro safe is of little consequence, but the theft of industrial diamonds bound for the Reich’s war machine is a red alarm, and our exhausted heroes are called in. Much has been said about them in earlier posts and will not be repeated here.

As usual no one will tell the the truth. As usual there are threats. As usual there are misleading clues. What is unusual is the audacity of the crimes, even high ranking Nazis in occupied Paris are been relieved of valuables they had just stolen from Jews! Audacious also in that three crimes were perpetrated in one night alone! Worse the booby traps have claimed victims, a chamber maid come to clean a room, a flic who opened a door, and a bomb disposal squad whose members should have known better. The villain also tries to eliminate St Cyr and Kohler; this a joker who plays for keeps.

The perpetrator, it emerges, is called The Gypsy, because part of his childhood was spent with some Romani people. Though he himself is tall, Aryan in appearance with the blond hair, and piercing blue eyes of a film star combined with multilingual charm and confidence. The irony is that his appearance and the Nazi uniform he wears, supplied by his would-be control, put him above suspension. His gypsy heritage ostensibly explains his preternatural skills as a thief.
Spoiler alert.
If I have grasped the plot, the Gypsy was in the slammer when the Nazis occupied Oslo. Then some bright Nazi spark had the idea of using him to infiltrate a Resistance network in France by inserting him as though he were an English agent. The connection would be made through a one-time girlfriend. What can go wrong? In return for exposing the Resistance network the Gypsy would be allowed to keep any loot he collected and sent on to Spain. (As if.) The members of the Resistance group he reveals would of course be tortured and murdered. The assumption was that the loot would come from the French, not Nazis themselves. So much for assumptions.
Once released, equipped, briefed, financed, and in France, however, the Gypsy pursues his own agenda. He slips his watchers, he manipulates the girlfriend into the frame and disappears. Then the robberies occur in rapid succession.
Now I may have gotten muddled because Janes’s elliptic style shows no mercy to slow wits. There is never a summation at the end in the Agatha Christie manner. But it seems the Gypsy had an earlier career of theft in Berlin where he stole from Nazis with great success until the Norwegians nabbed him. So far so good.
Meanwhile, the bright Nazi spark who loosened the Gypsy now tries to blame the crime wave onto (1) the Resistance and/or (2) St Cyr and Kohler. To that end this Nazi takes hostages, beats witnesses, and generally shrieks at one and all. If he cannot shift the blame, the axe will fall on him, no metaphor intended. Again I follow.
But what I do not follow is this. The Resistance network targeted was inactive, inert, and consisted of three well-meaning women who had done nothing and were never likely to do so. Nor did they have contact with others in the Resistance. They hardly seem a high profile target for such a far fetched and elaborate effort. That part I do not get.
Nor does the denouement make much sense to this reader. That these three women contrive and execute such a plan once the Gypsy shows himself is beyond my suspension of disbelief. That they nearly spontaneously concocted and implemented the plan is just not credible. They managed to out manoeuvre the Gypsy, the Nazis and the allied goons, and our heroes. If they were able to do that, well, why did they not do more for the Resistance?
Nor did I ever fathom what the Gypsy’s agenda was, apart form thieving for its own sake. He is simply a plot device in this outing and denied personality apart from one brief scene in the Metro.
On the other hand, the siege of the hideout is marvellously told as is the evocation of Paris in 1943 when a Nazi victory seemed on the horizon.
As usual our heroes are full of angst! But as usual the reader knows they will somehow square the circle. These two will survive to the next volume in this long running series.

‘The Accordionist’ (2017) by Fred Vargas

The German has long since retired from the Ministry of the Interior where he was am off-budget fixer. That is, he was a trouble-shooter who dealt mainly with criminal matters. If a baffling case was raising media hysteria, the German would be despatched to see what he could do to put a blanket on the fire.

Born Ludwig in Alsace, his few friends know him as Louis but his mother always called him Ludwig and he thinks of himself that way. In retirement he retains his network of contacts socially but they, too, are retiring. A man without family, a man without friends, a man without anything but a vocation – investigation – coupled with persistence and ingenuity, that is the German. Retirement offers him little reason to get up in the morning. He passes the time as a translator, currently working on a biography of the Iron Chancellor, which regrettably does not play into the story, as I had hoped.
Then an old friend, Marthe, brings him a problem. Her simple-minded ward seems to be embroiled in two murders. There is backstory of how he became her ward and then they later drifted apart. The ward was hired over the telephone to deliver pot plants to two women, each of whom was soon thereafter murdered with his finger prints on the door, on some furniture, on the pot plant….
While Ludwig is not convinced the dolt is innocent he owes Marthe a lot, which is not specified, and he is obliged to act on the assumption of dolt innocence. Hmmm. He trades on his past as an agent of the Ministry and first digs into the simple-minded youth’s past. There are ambiguities and gaps but by and large the lad seems within his mental limits an honest toiler, first as a gardener, but one who needs a lot of supervision, and as a busker with an accordion. That latter vocation supplies the title but again it does not play into the story.
The ward was set up to take the fall, as per the krimi manual. Yes, but why him? Is it all being done to get at this young man, or is it by chance that he was selected to serve as a scape goat, along with the murder victims. What could one so simple have done to earn such multiple, mortal enmity?
Following a parallel train of thought Ludwig ponders the two victims, who seem to have no mutual connection as far as he can determine from his police contacts.
He has the assistance of The Three Evangelists who recur in Vargas’s krimis, Mark, Luke, and Mathew. These three perennial graduate students share a house with the uncle of one, himself a retired plod. The three students are men and are students of history, one prehistorian, one a medievalist, the other who speaks only in the language of World War I trench warfare with which he is obsessed.
As the pages turn, each of them adds interpretations, facts, and insights into the mystery. Van Doosler, the uncle upstairs, does the cooking when he feels up to it but is otherwise aloof. Tant pis. I had rather hoped he would figure in the story as more than window dressing.
F Vargas.jpg Fred Vargas, whose books have been purged from ideologically pure women’s libraries because of the name Fred. Amusing, n’est pas?
The title in translation places the focus on the simpleton, but the French is ‘Quand sort la recluse’ which refers to Ludwig stirring, I assume. He certainly is the core of the story. While I gulped it down, as always with a Vargas krimi, I felt it was underdone.

‘The Modest Member: The Life and Times of Bert Kelly’ (2012) by Hal Colebach

Charles Robert ‘Bert’ Kelly (1912–1997) was a farmer from South Australia. A Liberal, he served twenty years in the Commonweatlh Parliament, where he waged an often solitary battle to lower tariffs, which he thought kept Australia poor and some in it rich. A ‘Liberal’ from a farming constituency was a rarity in his day during the agrarian ascendency of the Country Party of Jack McEwan. Kelly did not set out either to be a parliamentarian or to be a Liberal but became both.
Kelly cover.jpg
He became a parliamentarian this way. In his community he kept going to meetings and making ever modest suggestions, until others suggested he chair the meetings, perhaps as a way to shut him up. After making so many modest suggestions he could hardly refuse, so he did. Because he liked people and he liked agreement, he found the basis of agreement and that him popular in a modest sort of way.
All modesty aside, his father was very well connected and some of father’s friends saw the potential in young Kelly. In time these elders as well as his peers thought he was the man to nominate as the Liberal Country League candidate for the Commonwealth parliament. That is what the party in South Australia was called at the time, ‘Liberal Country League.’ He won as was predicted. In 1959 the Australian Labor Party had no chance in any rural constituency. Off he want to distant and foreign Canberra.
There he found the Liberal Pary and the Country Party were distinct entities, each having its own caucus, \ meeting room, and pecking order. Which was he, Liberal or Country? To McEwan any rustic came to Canberra to be his pawn and nothing more, so the Country Party sat back and awaited Kelly’s obeisance. Liberals in contrast were nice to him, helped him find his way in the labyrinth of (Old) Parliament House and more. There is no sense that this hospitality was a scheme, it just happened that a couple of avuncular Liberals befriended this young fellow wondering about Parliament House looking lost. What is implied is that the iron fist of McEwan, a man who had dominated Prime Ministers three, alienated Kelly from the zero hour. True or not, it is charming story that makes a point in a modest way.
For much of his subsequent career Kelly was the only Liberal of and from the bush. In time that gave him both an authority and an advantage. The authority was that he became the Liberal Party’s expert on agriculture. The advantage was that he represented Liberal wedge in the bush, one that some Liberals wanted to increase so holding on to him was an asset for them. Modest though Kelly was, he played both cards astutely over two decades. Yes other Liberals represented rural areas, but most of them were Bourke Street farmers, who visited the constituency a couple of times a year. Not so Kelly who continued to live on and work the family farm. Accordingly, he had an interest and a knowledge of agriculture few Liberals could match.
He went at being a parliamentarian the same way he went at farming, from an hour before dawn to an hour after dark. He was always a reader, and he found much to read in the parliamentary papers and so he read it. In time he became a self-taught economist specialising on one theme, tariffs and protection. The Great Tariff Wall of Australia did not make sense to him. While he was no advocate of free trade he did question the blanket and often secretive approach to tariffs. Though the words are not used in these pages, it seems he also supposed that the constant lobbying for tariff protection led to graft and corruption both among politicians and administrators.
And who was the dark Master of the Tariff in Liberal hegemony? Black Jack McEwan, that’s who! I was told once that the sobriquet ‘Black’ referred to his temper not his appearance.
From the first weeks when Kelly began to ask about tariffs, McEwan marked his card. Then came the Yellow Card in the form a visit from the then Deputy Leader of the Country Party and a McEwan acolyte. The message was ‘Shut up.’ Still Kelly kept reading, annotating, and asking. The details were so complex in time he changed his focus to the indirect questions of procedure. How were the levels set and for what reasons and then how were they implemented?
In retrospect the secretiveness of this process is surprising. Special Advisory committees with no tenure and no professional support from economists were created and then set the levels without either publication or justification. Again it is not said, but the inference obvious is that these committees promulgated the levels the minister who appointed them wanted set. That minister, Class, was….? Yes, Black Jack.
Any committtee member who resisted was thanked for service and dismissed. This exercise had flourished from 1949 and McEwan, while he did not invent it, brought to perfection. Then in 1961 the Liberal Country Party coalition won re-election by a single seat where a few hundred votes did make a difference, and Jim Killian made a subsequent career out of winning that seat.
Here is a paradox. That result made the support of the Country Party essential, and McEwan ratcheted up the pace of his demands on Prime Minister Robert Menzies, but it also made the voice and vote of the solidarity Liberal from the bush crucial in parliament and conspicuous in the media.
Comes the hour, comes the man. Kelly discovered his true métier. He had long written for agricultural newspapers and magazines, often about technical matters of crops and machinery. And sometimes when writing about new technology he had run up against the prohibitive cost of importing special machinery thanks to that Tariff Wall. He took to the typewriter with renewed vigour and much more detailed information and and won a national audience. He became a columnist not to be confused with the verboten C word of the era. His columns went under a few titles over the decades but ‘The Modest Member’ was the most enduring. Hence the title of the book and my several uses of the word ‘modest’ above.
When John Gorton had his brief moment as Prime Minister he put Kelly in the ministry in large part to silence him on tariffs under the rules of cabinet solidarity. Only that desire for silence could explain why this man from the interior of South Australia became Minister for the Navy. There must be a witty image here of him reversing Odysseus and carrying the anchor to the sea but I cannot grasp it.
In those days when the Royal Australian Navy wanted a new Minister a crash occurred. One night Kelly was woken by a phone call telling him the HMAS Melbourne had done it again and within a few days he got another late night telephone call to tell he was dismissed for letting that destroyer run into the ill-fated HMAS Melbourne. Back to the typewriter he went!
Kelly was an engaging figure, a writer with a perfect pitch for the general reader, a polemicist who argued from first principles when that was appropriate and from down to earth examples when that was the best place to start. He was no ideologue but rather he thought high, secret, and blanket tariffs held back Australia. The high, blanket, and secret tariffs were paid for by the consumer at the start, including farmers, and by would-be exporters, like farmers, in the end. Moreover, the high and ever higher tariffs encouraged sloth in both management and labour practices, affirming the historic compromise between Alfred Deakin and Billy Hughes a century ago. Kelly thought tariffs to shelter embryonic industries that otherwise would not be viable and which were vital made sense, but not five car manufacturers in a market smaller than some European cities! Such tariffs ought to be publicly justified and rationally explained, and not the product of lobbying by gift-giving agents.
Auto cartoon.jpg
Irony of ironies when the Whitlam Labor government cut tariffs by 25% one of the few voices raised in support of this revolution was the Liberal Kelly. Though many supported the move, few were brave enough to say so publicly. None of the thirty members of Whitlam’s cabinet uttered one word of support for this initiative. Kelly was one of the first of the few. One of the speeches excerpted in this book is an address he was invited to deliver to a convention of Labor economists. A generation later when the Hawke Labor government floated the Strine dollar, again he applauded. Again many Liberals agreed but kept silent. Again Labor cabinet ministers, apart from the Treasurer, kept silent.
Kelly at work.
Despite the title, this book is not a biography, more is the pity, but rather a string of excerpts from Kelly’s many publications with comments and transitions. There are asides about his early life but nothing chronological that shows the man emerging from the boy. Moreover, it jumps around in his career. We see glimpses of the man as rustic, parliamentarian, farmer, Minister, advocate but never the man whole at any stage. It is easy to read but in this respect disappointing. Tant pis.
The short Wikipedia entry on Kelly styles him a passionate free trader, something he spent years denying. in addition that entry mistakes effect for cause in saying he was ousted from the Gorton Ministry because of his opposition to tariffs. On the contrary he was put in the ministry because of disagreement on tariffs to silence him on that subject. Once sacked he was free to say his piece and he did.
He saw freer trade to be a means to cheaper consumer goods like cars, refrigerators, and footwear and the easier export of wheat and beef. Freer trade was a means to an end and not an end in itself as it is for ideologues.
Behind the Great Tariff Wall of Australia the automobiles were expensive and poor quality but many workers were employed in making them. Because of their cost and poor quality there was no export market. The same applied to refrigerators, fans, and every other manufactured product. Moreover, the Australian dollar was vastly overvalued at $US 1.47 in 1974, making agricltural exports too expensive for anyone to buy. A farmer paid high prices for tractors and could not sell any surplus overseas to earn the money to import new agricultural equipment which was over priced by the addition of the tariff. For a time the Commonwealth Government bought agricultural surpluses and distributed it as foreign aid, sometimes to places that did not need or want it, but all of this was a house of cards. Though it goes unmentioned in these pages the Oil Shock of 1973 finally blew this structure down once and for all.
Modest Kelly was but also at times mercilous. Consider Kelly’s comment on Andrew Peacock. He ‘has all the attributes I envy most: grace, charm, intelligence, and eloquence. But he gives the impression that he is waiting to be called to be Prime Minister’ and in the meanwhile he would rather not get involved in anything. Indeed.
There is in this book no account of the war years (1939-1945) except to say agriculture was an exempt occupation and Kelly stayed on the farm. But did he want to join the army at 28 and only reluctantly stay? Many men that age and older joined the army. Did he contrive to stay home? If so, how did he live that down? Later going to Canberra presented no problem to the farm. This defining hour for his generation of Australians is passed over. Gorton was a year older but served, and bore the scars thereafter.
Though later it is said a knee had been injured in youthful sports, there is nothing about that. Yet sports would have been a major social outlet for him.
And what about Lorna? She is often mentioned but we learn next to nothing about her or any children.
Colebatch RGB.jpg Colebatch is a widely published poet.
The book is a guide to some of the high points of his life but not a biography. To make a geologic comparison, it describes the sites but does not explain the geological forces that shaped them.
I was inspired to read this title at last (for a biography of Bert had long been on the assigned reading list) by the Australian Democracy Museum in Canberra, one of the failings of which was to give no recognition to the role and work of parliamentary backbenchers, the focus being almost entirely on prime ministers as though they governed alone. This the only ostensible biography I found.

‘The Perón Novel’ (1998) by Tomás Elroy Martinez

A novel of some 400 plus pages set at the time of Juan Perón’s return from exile in 1973. Half of the story is in Madrid as The General and his entourage slowly prepare for the return to Buenos Aires. As the day of departure draws nigh Perón and his secretary Lopez go over the latest version of his memoirs. Lopez is frustrated by the many inconsistencies in Perón’s litany of contradictory and fictional autobiographical statements but the General has no interest in such matters as facts.
Peron cover=2.jpg
Meanwhile at the airport, Ezeiza, in Argentina a throng gathers, leading the pack are journalists, including our author, who had earlier interviewed Perón in Madrid. Distant relatives of the General have been bussed in by another journalist, who has interviewed them looking for a new angle, and finding none. Others there include the Montoneros and their rivals, all armed. There are also Perónist unions and anti-Perónists, too. There are also urban beggars and impoverished campesinos come from afar for a blessing from the bearer of Evita’s fire.
Finally there is the army that in desperation arranged for the return only now to find the situation out of control. The factions in the army blame each other but none takes action, each checkmated by another.
The clock ticks and the forces gather while Perón’s muses on the past, the present, and the future. Perón’s confidence is diamond hard. He will put things to right. The entourage flutters around him reading auguries in his choice of shoes. But those forces gathering at the airport are, as the reader sees, comets following their own trajectories, bouncing off each other. There were about two million people in, at, and around the airport where he was scheduled to land. When the shooting started, as was inevitable, the plane diverted.
Having read a lengthy biography of Perón a few weeks ago, I could navigate many of the names of the actors in the drama. Without that a reader would be lost, as was I the first time I tried to read this novel a decade ago.
Peron dogs.jpg Perón always kept dogs and could be seen walking them in Madrid.
What’s to like? The portrayal of many of the supporting players is good, e.g., the relatives, the buzzing journalists, and some of the entourage. But others are cardboard like President Camorra and Lopez is an invisible man. He is there but has no substance, yet some say he manipulated everything and this is given credence in the pages here when he lip syncs a Perón speech.
I also liked the author as as journalist in his own story, which is done lightly and without making the author-journalist the centre of attention, as too many journalist-authors do.
More importantly, it seems Perón was a post-Modernist avant le mot in his refusal to privilege fact or truth. His easy dismissal of Lopez’s worries about consistency or authenticity are well handled. Perón’s explanation derived from Alfred von Schlieffen (page 210) made me stop and think. Von Schlieffen was the architect of the eponymous plan of attack on France in World War I. He was never wedded to the plans he made, but generated one after another. No sooner did he perfect one plan than he superseded it with another, because… a better plan is possible, if I thought of it so have my enemies and I have to stay ahead of them, circumstances change and plans change with them. The stereotyped rigidity of the Prussian Army did not apply to him, but then neither did it apply to the Kaiser’s army in World War I where junior line officers and sergeants had much more freedom of action than in the British army where blind discipline was enforced by firing squads.
Perón’s recollections of Eva ring true. His faults are many but he was devoted to her and she even more to him, and that is given full measure here. No cheap shots, no smart-ass remarks of the Bill Bryson kind. No easy hindsight of an ABC journalist.
Interesting also to see that Perón said that the example of Salvador Allende in Chile meant he had to go slowly. The threat of another coup, the threat even of a civil war is always there.
What is not here is the change in Perón from a man with a mission to the desire to rule period. Goal displacement occurred but there is no sign of it here. The subject and the treatment will remind read of Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘The Autumn of the Patriarch’ (1975), but this novel is much more accessible than the elliptic and, dare one say it, self-indulgent work of García Márquez.
Eloy Martinez.jpg Eloy Martinez
Eloy Martinez has another novel based on Eva, and that is tempting, but I found this one hard going. Maybe because I was only reading a page or two at a time, but much of the early chapters concerns the gathering kaleidoscope of Argentine society which had no interest for me. The Madrid part was more engaging. Once I started reading whole chapters at a time, I connected with it. I read while we tourists toured the goldfields of central Victoria.
The role of the army in Argentina has many dimensions, but one key one is this. In the United States, the Continental Army that defeated the British in the American Revolutionary War disbanded within days of the surrender at Yorktown. In Argentina the revolutionary army that drove the Spanish out remained under arms for forty years in continuing and continuous conflicts with the Portuguese, resurgent Spanish loyalist, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, French adventurers, the native indians, and so on and on. For two generations it was the only Argentine institution. However much it later debased itself, it was in this way the nation itself.

‘The Creation of the Humanoids’ (1962) at 1hr 15 min

This film rates a miserable and miserly 5.9 from 660 votes on the IMDB. That puts in the company of some Roger Corman’s creations. Democracy, so overrated, as Plato said.

This is a thoughtful science fiction film about racism and bigotry in a post-apocalyptic world. It starts with 92% mortality in a nuclear war, the origin of which is unknown, after which the survivors have created ever more elaborate and human-like robots. The robots are programmed to serve the best interest of humanity! Always tricky that, just ask anyone in politics. (Only journalists know all the answers.)
Humaoids cover.jpg A lobby poster
The robots are necessary but they have to stay in their place! Evidently some Republicans survived — no holocaust is ever perfect — and those who most want to restrict the robots are members of the Order of Flesh and Blood, i.e., code for the GOP. Indeedy. These Luddites accept the work the robots do so long as they look and act like mechanical contrivances and stay in their distant and inferior place. Jack Haley as the Tin Man in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is their idea of a good robot.

However, the robots themselves realise that such Tin Men are inefficient. They are technically inefficient, clumsy of movement, slow afoot, so they improve themselves with each new iteration. (The make-up is good on this.) The more important way in which they are inefficient is that there are social and psychological barriers between them and human co-workers. Some humans refuse to work with these talking machines.

The robots face the facts: the long term effects of the massive radiation unleashed in the forty minute war has doomed the capacity for human reproduction. The birth rate is falling at an increasing rate.
Humanoids confer.jpg The robots confer on their Key Performance Indicators.

For the Flesh and Blooders the answer is simple, ahem, as always, to get rid of those damn robots. Period. Their service makes us soft! Rid of them, humanity would fend for itself and grow stronger again, scientific evidence be damned! Ayn Rand should get credit for this part of the script. In her world the will power of rugged individuals could triumph over any old facts.

The Flesh and Blooders wear party hats and harass those who support and use robots. (On the hats, read below.) They skulk around robot recharging stations. Among themselves, the robots call the charging stations temples and refer to the master computer with admirable and anticipatory political correctness as the Mother/Father or Father/Mother. As it turns out, there is a point to this mumbo-jumbo.

Humanity is dying out and the robots will have to put a stop to it. And they do!
The drama is played out with two principle characters (Don Megowan and Erica Elliott). The irony is that the Luddite leader, vociferous and violent, is himself an undercover humanoid! But wait there’s more. His squeeze is also one of THEM! The explanation of all of that is ingenious and thought-provoking.
It is all talk and no action against cardboard sets spray painted in primary colours. It seemed more like a play than a movie, but the talk is interesting and I paid attention. A rarity that. That there is no action, that the women are fully clothed, and that it is complicated talk must together explain the democratic rating. The Maestro of ‘Dark Corners of this Sick World’ Robin Bales, no democrat he, also shreds it for the inertia and the inconsistencies in the story, while admitting that it is full of ideas. The alleged inconsistency is that it starts out about the downtrodden robots and then shifts to the future of humanity. Get with it Robin! It is a segue. Stories develop.

By the way, he, too. suspected theatrical origins but evidently found no confirmation, an inference since he left the point hanging. Just the sort of omission he derides in the films he reviews with his razor tongue.
Don Megowan, large of size, chiselled of chin, deep of voice, dark of hair, was a stalwart in television westerns for years, while Erica Elliot quit with this role, she also started with it, as did the director Don Doolittle whose coda was a nice touch.
Doolittle Dr.png Dr Doolittle, who talked to the vacuum tubes.
The opening credits say ‘Introducing Don Doolittle’ and the Internet Movie Data Base indicates this introduction was also his finale.

The hats the Flesh and Blooders wear are ersatz Confederate forage hats. They were sold as novelties at the centenary of the Civil War. Yes, I had one.
Humanoid hats.jpg Big Don is the big one.
Did they purloin those hats from the dustbins after a revival of ‘Gone with the Wind?’ Who knows. It is all of a piece with the hundred dollar budget for the film.

I came across it on You Tube when trawling for 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s science fiction.

It has whet my appetite for ‘Real Humans’ (2012), a Swedish series aired here, which for reasons lost to time, we did not watch.

Jaded cinephiles will think of Isaac Asimov’e ‘I, Robot’ and ‘Blade Runner.’ Readers may recall ‘Tin Men’ (1965) by Michael Frayn, which tried awfully hard to be funny.

Future Man versus the Man from Lisbon

Future Man won!
‘The Man from Lisbon’ (1978) by Thomas Gifford was homework for our 2018 Iberian excursion. It chronicles the escapades of Reis who lies his way into an engineering job in Angola in 1915. Africa seemed better than the Western Front. I got it from Audible, about which more below.
Gifford Lisbon.jpg
From humble origins, his father a mortician, Reis strives to better himself. But to get started he needs an angle in the stultified society of Portugal and this he procures by faking a degree from Qxford University in engineering. There will be few Oxonians in Angola, he reasons, and he will not be challenged. He does have some technical school training in mechanics so off he goes, diploma in hand, with his adoring wife and faithful sidekick in tow for Africa.
His forgery is nothing more elaborate than some expensive paper on which he writes out a diploma for himself. That ought fool ‘em! It does.
The little he knows together with the willingness to do the hard work himself lead to success in Angola. Soon he is doing two full time jobs as director of public works for the colony and director of the Angola railroad company with ease and raking in the escudos. While other engineers think the railway bridges will fail under the weight of the new engines he has imported, Reis is confident they will not. It is a confidence based on nothing. Damn those pesky stress tables! Even the laws of physics yield to his will power! Miraculously they do. It seems those stress tables were fake news avant le mot.
He returns to Lisbon loaded with dosh but blows his fortune on the vanities of automobiles, luxury fittings in his home and office, speculative investments that come to nothing. Getting desperate. he tries yet another bold swindle and this time the stress tables are right and he goes to the slammer in Oporto! I stopped at this point because I did not care about his fate, though I see on Good Reads some were gripped. It runs to be in all more than 21 hours. Agony without ecstasy.
Of passing interest was the account of early twentieth century Angola and its myriad natural riches. The colonials are sun-stunned alcoholics for the most part and the natives all but absent. Reis’s basic knowledge of mechanics sufficed, together with his readiness to get his hands dirty by doing the work himself, for his early successes, and also set him apart socially. The few other engineers in Luanda supervised natives who did the dirty work, but Reis did it himself, and got it done in record time and with good effect. These successes of course angered the others.
The references to World War I ring true because Portugal did join the Allies and suffered for it. But scant are these references. The Portuguese division on the Western Front was obliterated in a single day in an offensive. Its replacements met the same fate later. The survivors brought home Spanish flu.
The prose has many nice images. This Iowan Gifford could write, if only he had something to say.
Thomas Gifford.jpg Thomas Gifford
But my disbelief did not remain suspended. How could that hand written fake Oxford degree in Portuguese fool anyone? Second that will power prevails over stress tables, i.e., the laws of physics. But most of all, there was nothing about Reis of interest, a superficial egoist. So what, a dime a dozen they are.
The narration is by a Portuguese speaker who handles the proper and places nicely while mangling the English. Possessives invariable are said as ‘es’ and extra letters creep in elsewhere, too, e.g., ‘dastardsly’ and more. This became predictable and distracting. Twenty hours of this narration would be enough to put me off going to Lisbon in 2018 and so I took no chances.
However it was the inanity of the narrative that exhausted my good will. Thomas Mann’s ‘Felix Krull’ was the confessions of a confidence man (like Reis) whose career revealed the venal and moral corruption of post World War I Germany, told with wit, insight, grace, and rueful good humour. It dissected events and individuals with a scalpel. Not so here, where soft focus prevails. Me, I kept hoping the jerk, Reis, would get his comeuppance, and the sooner the better. I left him stewing in the Oporto slammer.
In contrast Captain Future together with his Futuremen in ‘Worlds to Come’ by Edmond Hamilton (aka Brett Sterling) from Radio Archives has to save the universe from a shape-shifting critter out of the sixth dimension! That narrative had purpose AND drive! This, too, was from Audible.
Capt Futue 14.jpg
Loved the death rays, atom pistols, proton canons, and other NRA boy-toys. Then there is the robot assistant who took itself apart to pass through a small hole in a wall and reassembled himself on the other side. That reminded of something I tried once without success near a girls’ dorm. The deathless brain floating around in a plastic box caused me to re-examine some of the leftovers in the refrigerator Tupperware. Yuk! Is that the fate for professors emeritii, I had to ask?
Of the moon pets the less said, the better. I am not picking up after them! And that is final.
The scientific explanations of the hijinks was pulp fiction which where it all began (1940-1951) and so suitable for a climate change denying anti-vaxxers. While I turned off ‘The Man from Lisbon’ I could not turn off ‘Future Man’ and I will go back for another episode of exploits, there being at least another fifteen! Whopee!
Ed Hmaitton.jpg Ed Hamilton
There is a ponderous entry on Wikipedia about ‘Future Man’ that almost destroys the pleasure in it. It has all the appurtenances of Cultural Studies. (I always fear the worst when I hear the phrase ‘Cultural Studies’ and it has never let me down. The worst follows that term as the night, the day. It is an even more reliable indicator of nonsense than ‘Post-Modern(ism.’)
I acquired both books from Audible, whose customer service is superb. I reported a problem in downloading these titles on the web page and got a phone call within the hour walking me through the correction. This was followed by an email setting it out in writing for future reference. Many profuse thanks. Of course, the problem was obvious once I realised it. Doh!
My listening is done on solitary dog walks while Majic sniffs the trees on nights when the diva is rehearsing or performing, or mornings when I am at the gym where I passed a hundred visits on the current annual membership as I have each of the retirement years to date.

The Legacy of the Civil War

The poet Robert Penn Warren wrote ‘The Legacy of the Civil War’ (1961). In it Warren asks readers to imagine General Robert E. Lee shaking hands and congratulating the strutting Southern governors of the 1950s and 1960s barring children from schools, encouraging baying crowds of Bible-grasping gorgons to shout abuse at children, licensing hissing mobs to burn churches, sanctioning lynch parties, raping and pillaging for sport, and praising masked men hiding in the dark. Would Lee approve such deeds done under that flag he served? No, he would regard such acts as the desecrations that they are, and he would have said so.
The old remains new.
A close examination of pictures from the March on Washington in 1963 will show Warren there on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial come to give his own thanks. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work, living most of his latter years in New England, no longer welcome in his homeland, and it shows in the poetry.
warren classroom-2.jpg
A callow undergraduate, I heard him recite some of his poems and the memory has since remained bright. There are some short excerpts on You_Tube.

‘Night Train to Lisbon’ (2008) by Paul Mercier

Raimund Gregorius, known as Mundus, teaches dead languages to gymnasium students in contemporary Berne, Switzerland. He eats and drinks dictionaries of ancient Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, barely noticing when his wife leaves him. His only topics of conversation is the ablative case in Latin, declensions in Hebrew, and inflections in demotic Greek. He can bring boredom to any dinner table and so is invited to few, well, none.
Night Train cover.jpg
Think Immanuel Kant, Mundus is a man of unvarying routine, a routine not interrupted by the aforementioned wife’s departure. Every morning at 8:15 a.m. he walks across a bridge to the school, where students and staff are silently agog at his myopic intensity. This he has been doing for thirty plus years for he is now fifty-seven.
In the rain, with wind inverting his umbrella, he trudges to school with a brief case full of marked essays to return to students whose every error, great and small, has been meticulously annotated, and he has prepared a lecture on the main themes in their work, mostly about their errors, which lecture he calls to mind as he wrestles the umbrella.
Losing the battle with the wind, he sees ahead a woman in a red coat, standing next to the bridge rail in the rain staring at a piece of paper. (Immediately I saw Irene Papas in the rain from ‘Zorba the Greek.’) The rain continues and the paper is sodden. Is she going to jump off the bridge into the gorge? He quickens his step; as he approaches he can see the ink running on the page. He looms up and she is startled out of her reverie and in reaction he drops his brief case spilling out the essays. In the ensuing confusion he takes her to a coffee shop across the bridge to regain composure. Even before getting away from the rain she extracts a piece of paper from him and writes down a telephone number, which in the coffee shop is copied again on a dry piece of paper, while Mundus sweeps the sodden copy along with escaping essays into his brief case. She keeps the telephone number once it has been transcribed.
They speak French and he discovers that she is Portuguese. He takes her along to the school where she can dry out in one of the women’s cloak rooms. He is thus late for his class; moreover the janitor is stunned to see Mundus late AND in the company of this woman, dripping on the just mopped floor. She goes off to dry, and with a word of thanks leaves. Enigmatic.
He goes to the classroom and thinks about what he has just seen, and done. He did not ask her the obvious questions. What were you doing standing there on the bridge. What is so important about that telephone number? Who are you? What is a Portuguese doing in Berne? He has spent his life not taking an interest in others and does not start now. Yet he cannot let it go.
As he hands back the essays, he notices the wet paper with the telephone number on it. (The pedant in me wondered how he could tell it was a telephone number, and not an account number, or social insurance number, a series of soccer scores, or…. ) He stumbles through the morning double class, quite uncharacteristically letting errors go unmentioned, and then goes to lunch. Ah, the life of the scholar.
This man is a loner and seldom mixes with others. On that score he has reverted to routine. He sits in another café letting the food and drink he ordered get cold: Portuguese, a Romance language derived from Latin, but that is all he knows. Instead of eating he goes to a bookstore that specialises in languages and finds Portuguese books. As a scholar he relates to books. He does not look for Fado music, or a Portuguese restaurant, or DVD of Lisbon travelogue. Bored on a rainy day and in awe of Mundus, of whom he knows, the store owner, who just happens to know Portuguese, reads some passages to him from a book of reflections, the substance of which reminded this reader of Michel Montaigne’s musing on life. Mundus likes both the sound of the spoken Portuguese and the musings which owner translates for him. He buys the book, along with a Portuguese dictionary and grammar and goes home, blowing off his afternoon class. This is the first class he has ever missed.
Overnight he begins to learn Portuguese. That may sound impossible but Ekkehard with whom once I shared an office in the Netherlands was a linguist who soaked up a language like a sponge. After a few days in the Netherlands he was speaking Dutch. Mundus finds the train connections to Lisbon by telephone (no internet for him) while dodging inquirers from the school come to look for him at the door and on the telephone, and he sneaks out of his apartment to go to Lisbon! By train. At night.
He has that telephone number. He has that book of musings. But why is he going? He asks himself that very questions more than once. He does hesitate but on he goes.
The local takes him to Geneva, where he changes trains for Paris, where he will change again for Irún in Spain and then on to Lisbon. While he rides he reflects on what he has left behind, a routine set in concrete that contains within its walls more sub-routines, and nothing at all, a series of nested do-loops that lead nowhere.
Night train station.jpg A European train station at night.
Mundus’s recollections of academic conferences, seemed familiar. All those people trying to prove (to themselves as well as each other) how smart they are. Yes, the one-up-man-ship is eternal, phrased ever so politely and usually by reference to some obscure secondary source from a foreign language. Who needs primary sources, after all. But also all those smart people for whom the subject is simply a commodity, today it is Louis Althusser and tomorrow it will be Michel Foucault, and then Jacques Derrida, with no inner feeling for or commitment to the subject matter, despite the ritualistic mouthing these days about passion. The passion is always about the ego, the self, not the subject. Though such poseurs would be the first to decry universities advertising degrees like products, they themselves approach their subject in the same detached way.
Mundus nails many academic pretensions on show in any seminar or conference.
– the high-flown gibberish that means nothing outside the classroom and very little within it
– French notions introduced as seasoning not substance, and unnecessary at that
– study is not fodder for an academic career, it is life itself with colour and melody to which a reader submits but does not conquer
Amen, Brother Mundus.
In Lisbon he begins to investigate the author, Amadeu de Prado. and pieces together his biography. There is detective work here, and the characterisations of the still-grieving sister thirty years later is a masterpiece as also some of the surviving school friends, especially Maria.
Lisbon_12 .jpg Lisbon
Amadeu is Mundus’s alter ego, yet he, too, was a creature of habit. Amadeu lived through the Salazar years and like all Portuguese still bears the marks of those days, good and bad. This is a new world to Mundus as he interviews family, friends, teachers, and others who knew Amadeu, who died years ago of a brain disease. Amadeu’s life is a microcosm of the life in Novo Stato of Salazar in his latter years with the PIDE, the secret police, had a free hand.
In Lisbon he makes no mention of the mysterious telephone number or the woman in red on the bridge who was the catalyst, but only that it seems. Indeed he stops thinking about her altogether and she does not reappear. If she did, I missed it, as explained below.
The musing is beautifully realised. Particularly striking to this scholar was the exchange of letters with the head of the school he left behind. When I mentioned this novel and this episode in particular to a lunch gathering of jaded scholars, there was a respectful silence, which I took to be each imaging the exhilaration that would follow walking away from a yet another pile to essays to mark, yet another pro forma about key performance indicators, yet another research grant application, yet another decanal briefing.
All that and more is true, but it does seem to go on and on for 4 5 8 pages. Mundus wanders through Lisbon, travels to Coimbra, and Finessterre in Spain, following links in Amadu’s life. Then he goes back and forth to Bern and…..THE END.
Like a bad student, doing a reading assignment badly, I kept watching the percentage tick by on the Kindle, ever so slowly. I kept at it because of the jewel like prose, the insights into friends, filial love, comradeship, chance, and so on, but there is no narrative drive. All trip and no arrival.
Pascal meericer.jpg Pascal Mercier.
The story is very well measured and the prose is exact, and yet a certain mystery remains. The film derived from the novel passed through the Newtown Dendy a few years ago and I was tempted by the prospect of a European travelogue but put off by the prospect of watching Jeremy Irons for two hours. Seeing him always makes me think, and no doubt this is just me, that he has haemorrhoid pain which he manfully bearing, just short of grimace.
The travelogue reminded me of my travels in those parts. I went to Geneva (from Zurich) by train to burrow into the archives of the League of Nations housed there by the United Nations when I was investigating the International Brigades for ‘Fallen Sparrows’ (1994) and then on by train to Neuchâtel to see some Jean-Jacques Rousseau manuscripts, an article based on this study appeared later. To this nerd boy both were thrills. In Geneva I found a 3” x 5” card file prepared by a Greek diplomat in 1939 of individual Brigadiers walking out of Spain to France: name, nationality, age, gender. Nothing much but authentic to the touch. Each soldier an Odysseus and few with an Ithaca to which to return. In Neufchatel I held in my hands, there being no requirement to wear gloves, pages that Rousseau himself had written. He would go on and on for pages after page of quarto, say thirty of them, and then there would be one cross-out, the prose just flowed from his quill in a steady pulse for twenty or thirty pages before it hit a rock. These are nerd-boy thrills.
Moe recently we took a night train from Amsterdam to Prague and back with DeutscheBahn. We did not do much musing. On boarding there were no directions or staff, but everyone with heavy suitcases, narrow corridors, and tiny compartment numbers elbow high. The compartment was a broom closet and the train was boiling — it must have been sitting in the sun for hours. Food was nearly non-existent. But there was worse. The toilet. [Gasp!]
The Man in Seat 61 recommended this service, and said it stopped four times. Get a new abacus, Mate! It was twelve times, each punctuated by bells, whistle, red flashing lights, and much yelling, no doubt all dictated by safety. We arrived exhausted and swore off such travel.