I wrote last summer about seeing Elgar's Coronation Ode performed at the Proms; to recap, it is a piece of jingoistic pomposity written for the coronation of Edward VIIth. The music isn't the Worcester Wizard's finest, but the really startling thing about it was the libretto, served up by A.C. Benson. Since Benson wrote the words to Land of Hope and Glory no-one should be surprised to find the Coronation Ode offered a disconcerting glimpse into the Edwardian mind, a place as remote from our sensibilities as the ice planet Hoth.
At the time I contrasted this almost incomprehensible difference with Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies, a historical novel which none of its admirers seems to have noticed superimposes a modern consciousness on Henry VIII and his hangers-on. Whatever else it is, BUTB (and its predecessor, Wolf Hall) is not a portrait of 16th century Britain.
If Elgar and Benson are utterly foreign to us only a hundred years on, Henry and his chums can only be recreated by a supreme act of imagination, which Mantel does not even attempt. I have always wondered what is the point of the historical novel, but one which doesn't even have a go at showing what might have motivated a people and informed their culture is more baffling than most.
I didn't expect to find Quentin Tarantino's new film, Django Unchained, doing this at all, let alone doing it a lot better, but it really does.
I'm not a Tarantino fan, finding the violence just a bit too pointless, but I like the bits of his films where the characters just talk to each other, and sure enough there is a quite wonderful encounter between Django, a runaway slave, Dr. Schutz, his mentor, and a slave owner, Calvin Candie, which forms the climax of the film (or should have - in a rare failure of pacing there's a further half hour tacked on in which Tarantino himself makes an ill-advised appearance). Candie, very well played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is a monster, and through him Tarantino has a very decent stab at doing something Mantel cannot. That is, showing someone thoroughly inhabiting a set of attitudes utterly alien to our own and yet functioning recognisably as a human being. Despite all the gore - the hallway of Candie's mansion appears at the end to have been showered in blood - I thought it was, as my children might say, proper good art.
I have recently found myself wondering what the composer of the Coronation Ode would have made of Britain today. Empire gone, locked in an uneasy embrace with the EU, gripped by austerity, in and out of recession. "Mightier still and mightier / Shall thy bounds be set"? Hardly. So I have written a five-minute orchestral piece, Blighty, which imagines a Pomp and Circumstance march for the new century. It is of course unperformable, a piece of post-modernism in which the language of Eric Coates rubs shoulders with hip-hop and ends with a whimper of defeat. But some pieces just have to be written.
As for Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies has just won another award. Funny old world.
