Houllebeq's "Atomised"

The borderline Aspergers being over-represented in the Males from Hale, the men-only reading group I frequent, scores are assiduously kept on our resident accountant's Crackberry.  In answer to my Stato-like query as to which book had the historic highest mark, Atomised by Michel Houellebecq turned out to be the winner. So I bought it for my wife at Christmas.  She hated it. "Give me Jane Austen any day", she grumbled after thirty pages, tossing it over to my side of the bed.

I have just finished it. From the reviews plastered on the cover I was expecting a cross between the King James Bible, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Joy of Sex. Only better. Sadly not. Atomised tells the miserable life stories of two French half brothers Bruno and Michel, abandoned by their hippy mother in childhood. Bruno turns out an inadequate sex pest; Michel an unfeeling scientist. The West, Houellebecq tell us, has given itself over to a cult of individualism. The more selfishly we behave, the more unhappy we are. Bruno and Michel are certainly unhappy. Michel's researches lead him to opportunities for cloning humans, and at the end of the book (spoiler coming) we learn that humans are obsolete and have created their genetic successors, free from weltschmertz and fear.

So far, well, quite interesting. There is, if you like that kind of thing, a great deal of rumpy-pumpy. I guess if you want to say that people are having a lot of empty sex with people about whom they care nothing, you have to show them actually doing so. Which Houellebecq obligingly does, page after tedious page. This palled fairly quickly for me. 

Then there's the technical problem of how, if your novel is essentially one of ideas, you weave those ideas in without lecturing. Astonishingly, Houellebecq makes almost no attempt to do this, so there are endless passages which read like a pamphlet, sometimes with the narrator addressing the reader directly, sometimes half-heartedly stuck into a scene such as the one in which the half-brothers tell each other about Aldous Huxley.  It is quite extraordinarily lazy and often very boring.

Neither is Houellebecq's book free from internal implausibilities and contradictions.  An early teenage admirer of Michel's, whom he unaccountably failed to shag at the time, turns up after 25 years and still carries a torch for him. "I just want you to give me a baby", she says (a characteristic piece of Houellebecq dialogue).  She is beautiful, of course. After an accident, Bruno's sex-buddy becomes disabled, and throws herself down the stairs in her wheelchair when he hesitates a fraction of a second too long before agreeing to look after her. We never find out exactly how Michel's human cloning manages to do away with all the painful aspects of life-before-death. Nor why humanity, of which the tortured Michel and Bruno are not exactly typical, was willing to connive in its own obsolescence.

All of which is a shame, because Houellebecq is right about lots of things.  We are obsessed with the idea of personal freedom, often with devastating results.  Atomised is mercifully free of PC so hardly anyone escapes a kicking. There are some odd patches of truly luminous writing. But reading the gushing blurb (Julian Barnes in particular should have known better) I was struck by how fearful are critics of discovering they have failed to get on the right bandwagon. And learning that the book had won Houellebecq the Prix Novembre, it occurred to me that bad novelists everywhere should take heart - Will Self, David Baddiel, Jeffrey Archer - nil desperandum: one day all this could be yours.

In and Out of the Loop

We went to see Armando Ianucci's In The Loop over the weekend.  

Despite the film's anti-war premise, and despite being someone who thought invading Iraq might turn out to be marginally better than leaving Saddam in place, I laughed till my face ached.

But it wasn't just the antics of uber-angry Malcolm Tucker (right) that were funny.  There were two other things about the film which made me smile.

Firstly, the alleged sexing up of the WMD intelligence, on which the film turns, overlooked the crucial point that almost no-one believed Alastair Campbell's dodgy dossier at the time.  Sure, there are left-wing Labour MPs who claim that they wouldn't have voted for the war if it hadn't been for Campbell's gilding the lily; but they have short memories.  Not long after it was produced, the dossier was widely ridiculed when a PhD student pointed out that some of it came from his work published on the internet. Then, as now, public credulity was in short supply.

But although the direct evidence was small, we knew Saddam had had WMD; we knew he had used gas on Kurdish villages; we knew he was doing everything he could to thwart Hans Blix and his colleagues; we knew that in Iraq's police state, where torture of dissidents and their families was routine, it would be very difficult to recruit informers, and hence the lack of direct evidence was not surprising.

Thus the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming, and not surprisingly everyone I spoke to (and this was a period in which bruising rows with my friends who opposed the war were routine) believed Saddam had WMD. Without exception.  The idea that the UK's parliament, the US government and the UN Security Council were swayed into war by a bad-tempered Scottish spin-doctor is itself a piece of spin.  Because, unappealing though the British government's manoevres may have been, they made no difference to the outcome.  As a public, we believed Saddam had the weapons anyway.

Of course Mr Ianucci would say, "It's a satire; a fictionalised account.  It's not meant to be a historical reconstruction".  Well OK up to a point.  But when real opponents of the war argue that we were led into it by a foul-mouthed Scottish spin doctor who sexed up the intelligence, and - lo and behold! - that's exactly what happens in Ianucci's film, it's a claim that will only run so far.

The second thing that struck me was, where was Saddam in all this? Nowhere. In Ianucci's film the war was to take place in abstract. That it would have the effect of removing from power one of the twentieth century's most ghastly dictators was airbrushed from sight.  

Why should this make me smile?  Because it confirms my thesis that if there's one thing the anti-war brigade don't want to hear about it's talk of Saddam. How inconvenient to be reminded of how things were under his regime!  As for what things would have carried on being like (after Saddam, his sons, then some other Ba'ath Party strongman), these are things opponents of the war cannot even begin to contemplate.  For them, success would have meant vast and peaceful rallies in London and Washington, followed by a climb-down by Bush and Blair.  

And for them, Iraq would have continued to be "a faraway country", to borrow from Neville Chamberlain, "of which we know nothing".

Rufus "Anonymous" Wainwright

So singer Rufus Wainwright has written an opera, and it's going to be put on at this year's Manchester Festival.  Lucky Rufus.  Last year it was Damon Allbarn's Monkey.  A while back the London Sinfonietta was looking for a composer to work with.  Who did they go for?  Answer, Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead.  

The moral?  If you want your work put on, don't bother going to Music College, learning your craft, sending your music to people who'll never read it, going in for the same competitions everyone else is going for, trying to scrape a living while you write in the little unused corners of your spare time that aren't taken up by your domestic life.

No, instead become a pop star, because apparently that's a bit of a draw for the powers that be in classical music.  

Don't get me wrong, these people may be talented and their work may be really good.  May be. But let's face it, they got the gig because they were who they were.  If they want to see how much their talent counts for, next time let them submit it anonymously.

Finally, spare a thought for poor old classical music, poking around in the bottom of the barrel for something the public might actually pay to see. Without wishing to labour the obvious, putting on works from composers the public quite likes might be a good place to start.  Why not stop commissioning Birtwhistle and Rihm, whose stuff the mass audience cordially loathes, and encourage instead composers who care about whether the listener has a good time and can understand what's going on?

After all John Adams can't be the only one who can do it.

hypocrisy central

The Guardian has had its knickers in a twist in the last few weeks over corporate tax avoidance, running a series of self-righteous articles under the heading Tax Gap.  In its most recent scoop, it published details of transactions undertaken by Barclays to minimise its tax exposure, which the Bank promptly got an injunction to suppress.

But now what's this?  The current issue of Private Eye suggests that the Guardian's owners have been doing a little avoidance of their own.  Last year, it says, they bought Emap, a magazine publisher, via a parent company in Luxembourg and a string of offshore subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands.  The aim?  According to the Eye, to avoid paying stamp duty on the purchase of Emap shares.

Pass the sick bag. 

Looking like Brad Pitt

Over in Halifax, the orchestra's concerts are dutifully reviewed in the Courier by a lady I have never met called Julia Anderson.  Her reviews are almost unfailingly kind to the orchestra and its Music Director.  However she has described my conducting style as "energetic" so often that it came as no surprise that after last Saturday's concert - Tchaikovsky 4 and the Emperor concerto - she felt the need for a new adjective.  

This time I was "attentive".  I'm not sure I like it quite so much as "energetic", but perhaps it was time for a change.  

For the soloist in the concerto, however, one word was not enough.  Ms Anderson found Duncan Glenday both "young" and "very slight of frame".  In a dark theatre appearances can be deceptive, but although all things are relative, "young" is probably pushing it a bit for Duncan.  And when am I going to get my own descriptive just deserts?  Who knows, if Ms Anderson thinks Duncan's young, she may well feel I look a bit like Brad Pitt.  

From the back, of course.  In a dark theatre.

Yes, I was in favour of the war!

Although my experience of having been - reluctantly - in favour of the Iraq war, amidst a class of people who were overwhelmingly against it, is a subject for another time, I was reminded of it this morning by a letter in the Graun about civilian casualty figures.  One Geoff Simons, author of Iraq Endgame: Surge, Suffering and the Politics of Denial, claimed that estimates of the dead topped one million.

Of course, no-one knows how many casualties there were, but it just so happens that the only organisation that has tried to count the actual individuals killed, Iraqbodycount.org, puts the total at slightly less than one tenth of that figure, ie at about 95,000.  Now that is a lot of people, but it is a lot fewer than one million (presumably that's why it was ignored by Mr Simons), and in any event as a marker of whether the war was a bad idea or not is meaningless unless you consider "but for" test.  Ie, but for the war, what would have happened?

Well, it's reasonable to assume that Saddam would have remained in power; that he would have continued to butcher and starve the civilian population as previously; that on his death he would have been succeeded by one or both of his sons; and that on the eventual collapse of the Ba'ath party regime, perhaps a generation into the future, a bloody sectarian power struggle would have ensued, only this time without the Americans to hold the ring and pay for the reconstruction.  In other words, more of Saddam would probably have been deadly too, and to come to a fair assessment you need to set the war casualties against those who would have died if Saddam had been left in place.  Unfortunately, you can't count those people, because no-one knows who they are; neither can you show emotive interviews with their grieving relatives on TV.

It seems to me, contra Mr Simons, that it's those opposed to the invasion who are in denial, because, however dreadful, it was probably no worse than the alternative.  It must be hard for people like him to accept that it's because Bush and Blair ignored their protests that Iraq now has a democratic government.  

A small satisfaction then of the post-invasion period has been the way in which the case against it has unravelled in the slowest of slow motion.

Symphonie Fantastique!

You can think you know a piece pretty well, but some new things struck me after conducting Berlioz's masterpiece on Saturday night for the first time.  

Extraordinarily, the Symphonie Fantastique was written in the same period (late 1820s) as Schubert's Great C Major symphony.  But where Schubert does his wonderful best to follow in Beethoven's footsteps - Schubert lacks more than a small part of Beethoven's great gift for construction based on motivic development, but nevertheless the Great C Major is recognisably designed on the same principles - Berlioz's method is something altogether new and different.  True, there are tunes, one of which recurs throughout the work, but Berlioz is less interested in contrasting and developing these than he is in the bravura opposition of brilliantly vivid and idiomatic orchestral textures; you might even say that this is the principal constructive device.

It shouldn't work.  It should be rambling and incoherent.  But it isn't.  Why?  Partly because the above-mentioned idee fixe ties it all together; partly because the ideas themselves are so wonderful; and partly because in the second half of the piece Berlioz cranks up the rhythmic excitement so successfully after the long silences of the central slow movement that you seem to be caught up in some crazy dance, a party that's got out of hand but that no one wants to end.

Conducting long symphonies like this one, I am sometimes just relieved to have got to the final bars without mishap.  But on Saturday, admiration for Berlioz's achievement came welling up at the finish, and now I can't wait for the chance to do it again.