Taking flight into a magical world

Wing

Matthew Francis

 

Faber & Faber

 

 

What better way to spend a chilly Saturday in early March, than curled up in a chair with a slender volume of poetry? In Matthew Francis’s Wing, I found the perfect companion for the afternoon, as wan sunshine tried to best the high clouds outside.

 

It was copy bought in Aldeburgh last September, on our brief escape from London before further measures to combat the pandemic were introduced. Neither The Other Half nor I are big on ‘shopping’, but after we’d booked the break, we discovered that the small town included a serious independent bookshop. And we knew instantly that we would pay at least one visit.

 

In the event, during a stay of nine nights, I strayed inside three times. Masks were worn, hands sanitised and then encased inside white cotton gloves that were left in a basket to be laundered on leaving. It is not a vast space, but oh, the bliss of being among shelves of books; of plucking unexpected titles off shelves, knowing that this was a well-deserved holiday-from-the-plague treat.

 

In a selection that was hugely influenced by the nature of the trip, Wing – published earlier in the year – was one of the books that went into my bag.

 

It is a joy.

 

With an overarching theme of examining microscopic life – and particularly the insect form – it also brings other wings into its embrace.

 

After opening the first section, Freefall, with a poem that starts with houseflies buzzing around where Francis is sitting to write, he concludes with a work of the same name – written “in memory of a friend killed in a parachute accident”.

 

Neither mawkish nor sentimental, this stunning verse blends the human with the natural world – even though the very fact of being in a plane and of parachuting is far from ‘natural’. But as the opening stanza has it:

 

Out of the metal shell of the plane, he hatched

Into raucous air,

 

and stretched out, breathless, as he’d done so often,

on the cushion of wind,

 

to crawl, crablike, across the irregularities

of the buffeting element.

 

Tissues of cloud below swathed the greens and yellows

of a chequered world.

 

The subject might seem out of place in a book of nature poetry, but it brings to mind Icarus and, in a collection titled Wing, is a counter – and poignant one at that – to the apparent effortlessness of flight in the non-human world; a reminder too, of the fragility of life.

 

The middle section of this collection is named Micrographia, after the “scientific treatise by Robert Hooke (1665)”, an English scientist who, with a microscope, was the first to visualise a micro-organism.

 

It is a remarkable melding of science and nature, as the microscope increases both understanding and also mystery.

 

The final section, Canticles, is more playful.

 

In Collective, for instance, Francis reinvents collective nouns: instead of a ‘clattering’ or a ‘train’, he posits a delightful “funambulism of jackdaws”. Forget ‘gaggle’, here we have a “chevron of geese” – how much more picturesque and accurate? – and a “double-take of blackbirds”.

 

And the poem finishes with a “shifting mandelbrot of starlings” – a glorious description of a murmuration, bringing science/maths into the impossibility of such miraculous formations.

 

In Sea Canticle, one cand almost hear the haunting tones of Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie (Sunken Cathedral), as the varied inhabitants of the seafloor float liquidly over and around the remains of a sunken sailing ship.

 

Wing is a glorious collection that, overall, has a quality of meditative awe at the complexity of life, even at its tiniest.

 

Wondrous.

 

New poem: Cold etchings

 

Cold etchings

 

The house faced east across the valley,

Stoic against the Pennine winters of childhood

When bitter winds would blast across the space

to bite at fingers blue and

Clog the arteries between towns

with snow that

Drifted and swirled and blotted out the view.

 

A plug-in Dimplex made bearable

the move from day to night,

Wan warmth radiated out to battle goosebumps

Until safety was reached

under flannelette and honeycomb and eiderdown,

With a piping bottle for frozen feet.

 

By morning, the large bow window would be frosted fast.

Frayed old towels folded on the sill below

Set to mop up when it thawed at last.

But before then

I’d dare to etch my initials on the glass.

 

This year, the cold snapped late.

But it was sharp enough when it arrived

To save some bees from neonics intended to beat a beet pest.

 

Locked down locked in I only saw

the rime through slatted blinds.

No early morning walks to the bus stop

Diverting slightly to surreptitiously

            etch messages on frosted cars

Under cover of decaying dark

As a fox barks in the nearby park.

 

 

8 March 2021

Praising grown-up Germany in the age of Brexit

Why the Germans Do it Better

John Kampfner

 

Atlantic Books

 

If you wanted to create a more provocative title, then it’s hard to see how you could better than that for this volume, which was published late last year.

 

It will inflame hardcore, Brexit-loving exceptionalists (never a bad thing), but it also won't be particularly popular with most Germans.

The latter group does not generally want to view its country in such terms: where the past lies so heavy, nationalistic bragging is out of the question for the majority.

Rather, there is continued reflection and concern – a situation not seen in the UK, where a loud minority feels free to howl some sort of superiority and, as Iain Duncan Smith did in January, at the end of the Brexit transition period, to hail the opportunity for Britain to “dominate” the world once more.

How Christ-like can you be? And I only ask the question, since IDS is supposedly a Christian.

So the history of the UK remains largely unfaced, to be seen only as one long, glorious victory. Raising the issues of statues to slavers is, for the right-wing elements of the press, 'woke’ and, of course 'cancel culture’.

But for author John Kampfner, it has, since the end of WWII, punched above its weight morally and ethically – and therefore, it’s not difficult to see why this is a legitimate suggestion.

 

It’s actually worth stepping back a bit to start with, noting that Kampfner is the son of a Jewish father who escaped eastwards from the Nazis, where he met the author’s English Protestant mother, who was a nurse in Singapore, where he himself was born.

 

Kampfner’s own CV is seriously impressive: he has worked as a journalist for Reuters, The Telegraph (initially in East Berlin), the FT, the BBC, and has been the editor of the New Statesman and current affairs editor of the British Society of Magazine Editors.

 

In other words, we can fairly approach this work without assuming an impinging and overriding personal/political ideology.

 

It is a fascinating book, combining elements of memoir, interview, data, history and lots more.

 

From a personal perspective and as a Germanophile myself, I am probably far better read on German history than the overwhelming majority of my compatriots. Indeed, I was whooping out loud when Kampfner described the lack of German history beyond 1933-1945 being represented in most British bookshops.

 

For a couple of decades now, that has been a way in which I judge a bookshop. I am not alone.

 

However, butting into this, I would take issue with Kampfner’s simplistic comparison of Prussia with Nazism. If you want to read more on that, then I can never recommend Christopher Clark’s superb Iron Kingdom highly enough. To be fair, I'd say read it anyway – it's the best history I've read.

I would suggest that he equally wrong on the green movement in Germany – in terms of timing. As Günter Grass’s 1986 novel The Rat illustrates, Germans were first spurred into action on the environment by realising that their forests were dying because of acid rain. And for Germans, forests are a massively important issue – as Kampfner does point out fleetingly.

He also stresses that, in Germany, free issues are not just the preserve of the political left. The environment has brought many together, including conservatives – hence the electoral success of the German greens. 

However, for all my pickiness, this is a brilliant volume in so many ways. If you sit anywhere to the left of centre – and frankly, I think that many of those on the right of centre would feel the same – this is actually a clarion call for conservatism. Note the small ‘c’. And it's not a bad vision or, in Germany, reality.

 

There are many things I recognised – as well as many that were new to me – and also many that I found myself longing for.

 

Kampfner is very good on the social market and, while it’s briefer in terms of pages, he’s even better on Germany’s verein – the clubs. Apparently, Germany expects all citizens to be part of community organisations. Reading this section, I found myself longing for such a sense of community in the UK.

 

I recall a boat trip around Lübeck on a Sunday morning and seeing all the local boating clubs active. And other individuals out waking and running and running and more.

 

Nothing since has suggested to me that Germans have it, in essence, wrong – and this book provides the facts to back this up.

Kampfner is not simply rosy-tinted about his subject – he see its faults and sets them down clearly. But even while admitting to being “more of a child of Thatcher” than he would have imagined, in his impatience with the German way of doing things economically, he now points to how the country has largely stuck to its beliefs on the social market – even as many other countries now start to make at least noises about the importance of community etc.

It’s clear that Germany is aided in being more ‘grown up’ by having none of the distrust and dislike of intellectual activity that is particularly rife in English life. He describes how Angela Merkel loves to discuss high culture – and contrasts that to David Cameron, who was embarrassed to admit, at a dinner with the Kanzellor, that he just watched telly when off duty.

As Kampfner goes on, it’s a perfect was to illustrate how a liking for high culture is generally disparaged in the UK as elitist etc – where the situation in Germany is quite different (the number of small towns in Germany with opera houses is a succinct illustration of this).

But then again, German conservatism is ‘girly swot’ Merkel and here, it’s Boris Johnson and his rabble of an untalented Cabinet that happily trashes ‘experts’ at the first opportunity.

In the age of Brexit and Johnson, Kampfner’s book is an important read and corrective.

Cosy? There's more to Richard Osman's debut than that

The creator and co-host of TV quiz show Pointless, and eponymous host of Richard Osman’s House of Games, has been busy with a little sideline: he’s written a first novel and it’s a crime caper.

 

The Thursday Murder Club came out last autumn and hit the best-seller lists in style – Steven Spielberg ha already bought the film rights (cast it right!).

 

I admit that I considered buying it then – having an extremely squishy soft spot for quality crime fiction – but didn’t, on the basis that, while I didn’t think it would be rubbish, my expectations otherwise were quite low.

 

Thankfully, a late review convinced me otherwise: I have just turned the final page and I can hardly wait for the sequel. 

 

A group of pensioners – former intelligence agent Elizabeth, former trade union leader and firebrand Ron, former nurse Joyce and not-entirely former psychiatrist Ibrahim – are members of an informal club at the village that pours over cold murder cases.

 

But when a builder and a property developer are murdered, they decide to get in on the real thing.

 

Now, I like quizzes and puzzles – and I’m not bad at them – but House of Games is, to me, like a cryptic crossword: on a level that I find entirely befuddling. I struggle so badly that, if I do get something right, it’s nearly followed by a lap of celebration around our tiny living room.

 

While not actually cryptic, The Thursday Murder Club is not obvious: Osman leads the reader a very clever dance that will have you in the dark until the end. Perhaps this is the ultimate way of creating a puzzle?

 

A Guardian review in October described the book as: “an amiable if undemanding cosy caper”. It’s “cosy”, certainly, but that damns it with faint praise.

 

What makes this special is Osman’s clear gift for creating believable and sympathetic characters. The central quartet are all wonderfully drawn – and not least, in terms of their dealing with age, their own impending mortality and indeed, their fear of, or dealing with, the dread of dementia.

 

And because Osman clearly care for his creations, the reader does too.

 

It’s very, very funny in places. I laughed out loud more than once and chuckled frequently: there’s a very English, gentle humour at play here … but also, à la the late, great Sir Terry Pratchett, I cried too. More than once. It’s morally complex if you care to consider. But beyond that, you care for these characters.

 

There’s a second novel on course, apparently – as well as the movie. But do read – it’s a joy in so many ways.

A plague on all our houses

Bruised and battered,

Brought low by its own benighted will,

Perfidious Albion crawls toward its golden dawn.

 

The high priests of Brexit now

Preach that, just as

Plucky little Blighty

Won in ’45,

So We Have Won Again.

 

This time the prize

Will not be having played an honourable part

In a defeat of fascism,

But blue passports for all and

Unicorns that frolic on the sunlit uplands.

 

Plague Island

As it has become,

Is governed by clueless clowns;

Corrupt and cronyistic,

Liars every one.

 

A tousle-haired buffoon,

A Ghost of Years Gone West;

A gurning schoolboy who proclaims

This country is ‘the best!’

Let’s not forget the bully,

Who loves being smirkingly cruel,

And all their colleagues who believe

Poor children should feast on gruel.

 

Don’t forget the one who claimed expenses for his stable

Or he who dished out housing deals

To those around his table.

Recall the dolt who didn’t know

That Calais is rather near!

And the cheesy one whose trade deal claims

Bring forth an embarrassed tear.

 

Who voted for this bunch of goons,

Fiddling while the country burns?

 

It wasn’t me.

But have I done enough

To counter all their lies and obfuscation?

Or am I some sort of Vichyite,

Happy to go with the flow,

Avoiding complication?

 

I really don’t have a crib sheet,

I don’t really know what it means.

But I do know we need to be sharper

To think logically and

Not just to dream.

 

For dreams will not bring us progress;

And dreams will not combat the lies.

So put shoulder to the wheel

And hope we might learn to be wise.

                                                                            December 2020

Musical pleasures for a classical Halloween

As we near Halloween – and indeed, All Saints’ Day, All Souls’ Day, which are heavily linked to the Gaelic Samhain, with its Celtic pagan origins – there are plenty of lists and playlists around to get the 21^st century, US-influenced party going.

There are also lists of classical music suggestions for the celebration of All Hallows’ Eve.

 

In the latter category, there are obvious pieces that sprint to mind: Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bare Mountain (1867) and Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1897) top the list, both having been introduced to many people over the years by being used in Disney’s 1940 animated classic, Fantasia.

 

In terms of creep credentials, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor (penned sometime between 1704 and 1750) takes some beating. Heard in an orchestrated version at the opening of Fantasia, with a silhouetted Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, it had made a horror impact years earlier.

Johann Sebastian was probably not intending to make audiences shiver, but the work had already been heard in the 1931 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the 1934 horror classic, The Black Cat – and it has been used many times since in suspense and horror contexts, including in the 1962 adaptation of the Phantom of the Opera.

Personally, of the more obvious pieces, I’d go for Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (1830) – and not just for the final movement, Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath (surely the template for a scratchy ‘witchy’ sound) – but also for the short fourth movement before it, March to the Scaffold.

And let us not forget a quick mention for Danse macabre, an 1874 tone poem from Saint-Saëns that has been used in many media – including in an adapted form as the theme tune to the BBC mystery crime series Jonathan Creek.

 

However, there are less obvious and less fantastical choices if you want something to tune into over the coming days, as the ‘thinning’ between this world and the next that is marked during Samhain, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day perhaps calls for a more contemplative approach.

 

Let’s start with Mahler’s Symphony No1 in D major (Titan), composed between late 1887 and early 1888. It is full of musical joys, but the one that concerns us most in this context comes in the third movement.

Here, the composer took the children’s song Bruder Jakob – Mahler knew it as Bruder Martin and it’s more widely known still as Frère Jacques – switched it into a minor key and made it part of a funeral march.

The effect is unnerving to say the least.

In non-Halloween terms, the fourth movement is fascinating in all sorts of way and, in places, seems to echo Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture while equally prefiguring John Williams’s marches for the Star Wars films.

 

Sticking with Mahler, the 1904 song cycle, Kindertotenleider (Songs on the Death of Children) is also worth spending time with. Based on a group of 428 poems written by Friedrich Rückert in 1833–34, after the death of two of his children, the composer set five of them to music.

Mahler himself was no stranger to such tragedy: eight of his own siblings had died in childhood and his second child, Maria, died at the age of four from scarlet fever.

He had carried on composing Kindertotenleider just shortly after the birth of Maria – something that horrified his wife Alma – and after the child’s death he wrote to a friend that “I placed myself in the situation that a child of mine had died”.

 

The work remains a haunting one of grief and loss.

 

If death is the one inevitability that we all share, then a much more recent work portrays it in a way that is every bit as haunting as Kindertotenleider.

 

Totentanz, by Thomas Adès, was composed for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and large orchestra, and was premiered in July 2013 as part of the Proms.

 

The music sets an anonymously authored text that appeared under a 15^th century frieze in the Marienkirche in Lübeck in northern Germany. This had shown “members of every category of human society, in strictly descending order of status, from the Pope to a baby. In between each human figure is an image of Death, dancing and inviting the humans to join him,” as Adès described it.

 

I missed that Prom, but coincidentally had been to Lübeck and visited the Marienkirche just a few months before that Proms premiere. I could hardly have been more excited when, earlier this year, just before lockdown, it was finally released on a new Deutsche Gramophon CD, Adès Conducts Adès (the disc also includes Gershwin expert Kirill Gerstein on piano for Adès’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra – a work strongly influenced by the great Gershwin).

 

Totentanz is a magnificent piece – amusing at the beginning in its sense of the powerful no longer having power in the face of mortality, but moving and genuinely sobering as it progresses toward its climax, where Death finally takes a baby.

 

The Totentanz mural in Lübeck was created in the confessional chapel in the Marienkirche in 1463 by Bernt Notke, a year before the plague reached the city from the south. It differs from similar artistic reminders of morality in that the background is recognisable as the spires of Lübeck. It was replaced by a copy in 1701 and destroyed by bombing in 1942 (see pre-war photo  of part of it at the top of this page).

 

Whether or not it is the perfect piece for contemplation in this time of a pandemic, I highly recommend Adès’s work.

 

Have a good weekend – and if you have any recommendations of your own, please share them here.

A Secret Garden for our age

In 2019 BC (Before COVID) when The Other Half and I were still regularly visiting the cinema on our way home from work on a Friday, we had already seen, more than once, the trailer for a new adaptation of Frances Hodgson’s Burnett’s classic children’s novel, The Secret Garden.

Trailers are teasers, of course  but this one provoked optimism and indeed prompted me, in February this year (still just about BC) to re-read the book.

 

The copy had been my mother’s, which I had brought home when I cleared my parents' home after their deaths. 

It was a new edition from 1942, with colour plates, a tattered dust jacket and inside, a loose, unfilled bookplate from the token with which she had almost certainly bought it for her eleventh birthday.

On the bookplate was a picture of a giant tulip growing up from bombed urban ruins.

I hadn't seen the bookplate for years but, while I remembered it visually, it was only this year that I felt a sense of what it was about.

 

On 3 May the year, CE (COVID Era), on the third anniversary of my mother’s death, the book and plate found itself in a poem I wrote about her.

 

Today, I finally caught up with the new film, released in a hodgepodge of ways, given the pandemic, including via Sky Cinema.

 

The novel was written in 1911, but Burnett's work avoided any of the cloying sentimentality that might have been left over from the Victorian era. Both Mary Lennox and her cousin Colin are unpleasant children: as we discover, that is a direct result of their respective upbringings, and redemption and reform is possible.

 

Mary has been orphaned; Colin has lost his mother and been confined to a room in the family manor by, in effect, his father’s utter terror that his son is weak and will die like his mother before him.

 

Here, the film has been updated to 1947. And it suits a version of the story that reflects today’s far greater awareness and understanding of psychology, of mental health and ill health, of grief, loss and much more.

 

It also chimes with our growing understanding of the restorative – and indeed, redemptive – nature of nature. This is a film that, without doing so clunkily, acknowledges the benefits of nature for mental health, and thereby presents a subtle but strong environmental message too.

 

Nature needs to be healthy for us to be healthy. We cannot exist separately.

 

Jack Thorne’s script is to be applauded for all this – and for its eschewing of an easy sentimentalisation of the story; for making Mary and Colin both initially unpleasant, but also understandable and redeemable. It’s a fine line, and one that the film charts well.

 

Director Marc Munden lends the story a sense of the magical that is far more pronounced that in the novel, but it works – again feeding into that environmental theme.

 

This is a small cast, but Dixie Egerickx as Mary, Edan Hayhurst as Colin and Amir Wilson as Dickon are excellent as the children upon whose shoulders any sense of believability in this fable rests.

 

As the adults, Colin Firth as Lord Craven and Julie Walters as housekeeper Mrs Medlock are … well, precisely what you’d expect from a pair of such fine actors.

 

If I have a criticism, it’s primarily that Dickon and his sister (Isis Davis) are not seen as fully as they are in the novel and that we don’t get as full a sense of the Yorkshire moors in the film as we do in the novel.

 

But this is probably a bit whiny – and I have to say that I do love the giant rhubarb!