The Party

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A new book from Tessa Hadley is always a treat, even a slim novella like The Party. It ought perhaps to have been called Two Parties because the story is bookended by two social events, attended by two sisters, Evelyn and Moira, both students. The first takes place in a Bristol pub shortly after the end of World War Two and the second, more of an ad hoc get-together, in a grand but faded house elsewhere in the city the following weekend.

How far can any of us really achieve the lives we want to have? What real influence do we have over the shape of our future? Can we realize the lives we want by sheer force of personality and determination, or are our futures mapped out for us by factors over which we have so little control such as class or gender constraints, real or perceived? These are the questions that interest Tessa Hadley, and she uses the sisters with their common upbringing and history as exemplars of two distinct perspectives. Not that Moira and Evelyn are simple cyphers. Not at all. Hadley is far too accomplished a writer for that, and Evelyn especially is a brilliantly realized character.

Does this all sound a little old-fashioned, like Anita Brookner or Barbara Pym for the 21st century? Perhaps, but don’t be put off. There is more inventiveness, daring, and insight in Hadley’s writing than some more experimental novelists can dream of realizing.

Creation Lake

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Only a very confident and self-assured author takes a familiar genre, in this case the spy novel, and uses it as a channel for ideas. A burden comes with that decision. Spy novels are traditionally plot-driven vehicles and readers of the genre expect pace, twists and turns, and action. So manipulating and subverting the classic espionage tale is all very well, but the ideas had better be worth the effort and at least some of the familiar features of the genre had better be respected. No one ought to buy Creation Lake expecting a conventional spy novel, and anyone who does will be disappointed. If that happens, some reviewers might be responsible. The Guardian critic talked about “a killer plot and expert pacing”. That’s downright misleading in my view.

Sadie Smith, the heroine and narrator of Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, is a spy working in the private sector and has an assignment to infiltrate a shadowy group in rural France suspected of planning acts of sabotage. Sadie is unscrupulous, a quality that might be considered an asset in her line of work. It has, however, got her into trouble in the past when, working for a spy agency in the US, she was found to have entrapped an innocent man and got fired as a result. Now in France, she has seduced an impressionable activist to gain entry to the suspected terrorist cell. This lack of a moral compass might be Sadie’s least unattractive quality. Her superficial pronouncements on everything from Europe and its culture (overrated) to Italian food (horrible), her glib philosophizing (“The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, is a substance that is pure, and stubborn, and consistent”), her unassailable belief in the superiority of English (in other words American) culture marks her out as the worst kind of entitled, privileged, and semi-educated American who has everything, values little, and has earned nothing. Sadie hacks into the emails of Bruno Lacombe, the leader and guru of the protest group, and pokes fun at his tiresome ideas, but his silly intellectualizing about what we can learn from Neanderthals makes him look like a genius compared to Sadie and her moral vacuity.

I am surprised that Creation Lake was shortlisted for The Booker Prize. It’s a novel that’s executed with lots of confidence and it’s an enjoyable enough read, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that there’s no substance or heart in the book. Rachel Kushner’s critical reputation seems to be growing with every new novel, but on the evidence of the two I have read (The Flamethrowers and Creation Lake), I don’t understand why.

The Duchess of Malfi

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It is believed that John Webster wrote The Duchess of Malfi in 1612 or 1613. That puts the play’s creation at around the same time as Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Henry VIII. It was performed very widely when it was first written and has continued to be staged ever since. I can recall seeing it in London decades ago, but only have the faintest memories of the production. It is easy to see why it might resonate with modern audiences given its preoccupation with misogyny, power politics, and with men’s efforts throughout history to control women. It’s not short of violence and gore, so that might also partly explain its continuing appeal.

The modern adaptation I saw staged recently in London may introduce a new generation to the play, though its insistence on 21st century English gave little or no flavor of how Webster’s original text sounded. The themes survived, but the poetry of the original was lost.

Married Love

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There is a new Tessa Hadley novel coming at the end of the month (The Party). Hearing that news while I was browsing in Hatchard’s recently prompted me to pick up an older collection of short stories, Married Love, first published in 2013. The cover includes a gushing quote from The Times‘s review, describing the collection as “unexpected, exhilarating, life-changing”. Married Love is none of those things. It’s an uneven collection that includes masterful stories and some that miss the mark. The best of them are a reminder of what a supremely accomplished writer Hadley is. I have pre-ordered The Party and will devour it once it arrives.

Francis Bacon: Human Presence

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Is it appropriate to measure the greatness of a painter by the range of human feeling they elicit in the viewer or display on the canvas? Perhaps narrow and deep should be sufficient, picking at one feature of human existence over and over again, worrying relentlessly at a scab to burrow deeper to discover and uncover the real wound beneath the surface. The thought occurred to me walking around The National Portrait Gallery’s outstanding exhibition of Francis Bacon’s portraits, Francis Bacon: Human Presence.

Bacon understood despair and the awareness of futility. He knew something about the longing to accept and impose cruelty. Suffering, isolation, and pain are never far from the canvas. He detected such things in the artists and paintings he admired, in Velazquez, Picasso, and Van Gogh. He discovered over time his own language in paint to express such things. His greatness lies in that language. His reputation is growing all the time, eight decades after he made his first impact on the world, and his work reverberates even more powerfully now when so many experience the world as a threatening, ominous, and lonely place.

Where is the affection, tenderness, and love in Bacon’s world and work? An exhibition devoted to his portraits might reasonably be expected to be a useful starting point, perhaps in paintings of his friends (including Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach) or lovers (Peter Lacy, George Dyer, and John Edwards). But Bacon’s grim inspection of the skull beneath the skin is abundant even here and the portraits are full of snarling, grimacing, and screaming faces, many of them distorted by injury and pain. Only in some of the later paintings, especially one of John Edwards, is some tenderness detectable. Did Bacon soften slightly in old age?

This was one of the most impressive and compelling exhibitions I have seen in recent years. An opportunity to see some really important pictures rarely on display (notably the double portrait of Freud and Auerbach which I had only see before in reproductions), and confirmation, if confirmation is needed, of what a great (and grim) artist Bacon was.

Juno and The Paycock

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Sean O’Casey’s classic drama was first staged in Dublin in 1924. It had been written two years earlier when civil war was raging in Ireland. A hundred years on, Juno and The Paycock has become a staple of Irish theater, but is less frequently performed elsewhere. I have seen it on two or three occasions, once in London for sure decades ago and once in New York City more recently. It is a challenging piece to stage. In the wrong hands, the comedic parts can easily descend into caricature, the tragic parts can look maudlin, and the whole can come off as sentimental. When I learned that one of my favorite actors, Mark Rylance, was taking on a leading part in the play in a West End staging, I was keen to get a ticket but also a little apprehensive. O’Casey’s plays explore universal themes, but they are very explicitly Irish. How would decision to cast all three of the main parts to two English actors and one American play out?

It proved to be a problem (none of them could sustain a reliable or authentic Dublin accent throughout the performance I saw), but not the most serious problem. Act 1 was played for laughs, with Rylance (Captain Boyle) made up to look like Charlie Chaplin and hamming it up at every opportunity he was given. The audience loved the Vaudeville-style brilliance, but as the drama turned towards darkness and tragedy it proved impossible to pull it back from the brink of farce. The terrible sadness at the heart of Juno and The Paycock was never shown because the early humor proved too hard to resist and rein in.

It is a play about the places we find meaning, consolation, and redemption. Religion for some, politics for others, not to mention the distractions of alcohol and romance. For Juno, family is everything. Her tragedy is to be the only one in her family to realize that.

Nicholas Hawksmoor: London Churches

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I can hear the bell of St. Anne’s, Limehouse tolling as I write. The church is preparing to celebrate its 300th anniversary, and every time I walk past it, I imagine what the local people must have thought back in the 1720s when this monumental structure started to take shape around them. Even today, with Canary Wharf’s glass and steel towers looming in the distance, St. Anne’s holds its place proudly, but three centuries ago it must have been nothing short of astounding.

I was inside St. Anne’s recently to see an exhibition of photographs taken by Helene Binet and displayed to mark a project to restore all of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s extraordinary London churches. Hawksmoor was the great beneficiary of Queen Anne’s so-called Fifty Churches Act of 1711. The grandiose project envisioned originally never came to full fruition. Only twelve churches were completed. Nevertheless, the vision gave us what many today call the Hawksmoor Six: St. Anne’s, Limehouse, St. Alfege in Greenwich, St. George-in-the-East, Christ Church, Spitalfields, St. Mary Woolnoth, and St. George’s, Bloomsbury. We can add the decommissioned church of St. Luke’s, Old Street, and the now demolished St John Horsleydown, but it’s the Six that most people know and that are the subject of the conservation effort.

As I strolled around looking at the huge, imposing photographs, and reading about the restoration appeal, I got talking to a volunteer who alerted me to a wonderful book by Mohsen Mostafavi and Helene Binet, Nicholas Hawksmoor: London Churches. Binet’s sharp black-and-white photographs steal the show here, but the floor plans and stylized outlines of each church are also rendered beautifully, and are accompanied by short essays. No book can do justice to the splendors of these remarkable and precious churches, but when I’m away from London I like to dip in to London Churches to remember them.

Has anyone seen Charlotte Salter?

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I have read many novels by Nicci French over the years, including the reliably excellent Frieda Klein series. They are dependable, plot-driven page turners, filled with the usual narrative twists and turns that the genre demands and with more or less believable characters. The latest standalone story, Has anyone seen Charlotte Salter?, checks all those boxes. A woman goes missing on the evening of her husband’s fiftieth birthday party, leaving behind her stunned and bewildered children. Thirty years pass without any trace of her. No body, no sightings. Just the mystery of her sudden, inexplicable disappearance and the hole it left in the lives of those who loved her. No plot spoilers here …

There is no way to deny the authors’ mastery of the genre. Years of experience are visible on every page. Having said that, my interest in the plot and characters started to flag at one point, and it took the introduction of a new character two-thirds of the way into the novel to revive it. Even then I turned the final page feeling that the denouement was rushed and unconvincing. An enjoyable, workmanlike performance from Nicci French, but not a classic.

The Western Wind

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The Western Wind is a novel set in a small and isolated English village at the end of the 15th century. Its narrator is the local priest, John Reve. John’s parish, Oakham, is a farming community, mostly poor, mostly hardworking, and mostly god-fearing. As the story opens, its wealthiest and worldliest member, Tom Newman, is missing, feared drowned in the treacherous local river after unprecedented storms and floods. His torn shirt has been found, nothing more, and the villagers are distressed and fearful. The local dean, representing ecclesiastical and temporal power, has arrived to investigate, making things uncomfortable for Fr. Reve.

My summary makes the novel sound like a medieval mystery story. To some extent it is, but there’s so much more to The Western Wind. It’s a beautifully written and thoughtful tale about faith, superstition, and power, and about how and where we find meaning in life. It’s a novel that never strives to be explicitly historical, but is filled with authentic detail of life in a medieval English village. It plays with time, telling the story in reverse, and this helps make medieval Oakham shockingly modern. It’s best read slowly and carefully, with every sentence savored.

Autocracy, Inc.

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The emergence of autocratic regimes has been one of the defining features of the global political landscape in recent years. Russia, China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Belarus. The list goes on and on. In Autocracy, Inc. Anne Applebaum gives a short but compelling account of the phenomenon, focusing less on why these anti-democratic leaders have prospered and more on how they operate. It’s a necessary and urgent read, written with passion, intelligence, and deep experience. Anyone troubled by and curious about what is happening ought to read it. For me the most eye-opening part of her account was the interconnectedness of the autocracies, the sense that they operate very effectively as an international system, a supportive network that offers an alternative world order. It’s a network that relies heavily on the willingness of the international finance community to hide and launder the autocrats’ ill gotten money and on a global diaspora of friends and fellow travelers to sustain it.

I would have liked the author to emphasize more strongly how the autocrats have studied the playbook of Western democracies when it comes to propaganda techniques and other ways of controlling their messaging. The anti-democratic regimes have built upon techniques devised and deployed over many decades by Western democracies to spread their own ideology. Autocracy flourishes for many reasons, not least because the financial systems based in liberal democracies enable it and because it has learned how to use and extend some of its tools to great effect.