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Today is V-E Day. Place de la Comédie in Montpellier was cleared for a few hours of its café tables and lounging youths while the military paraded in commemoration of France’s “victory”.

Faced by ranks of braided motorcycle gendarmes, tricolor bunting and martial music, it might be easy to forget that the 8th of May 1945 was as much the end of a complex and painful period in French history as it ever was a triumph. The story of Occupied France is fascinating, raising many questions about personal morality, politics and memory.

After the war, with de Gaulle as president, the myth of a nation of stubborn résistants and a handful of cowardly collaborateurs emerged. This convenient simplification of history was perhaps necessary to underpin the rebuilding of a traumatised society and economy.

In the turbulence of 1968, a revisionism of the myth started to emerge. Max Ophüls’ film Le Chagrin et la Pitié was the first to explore the reality of French experience under Axis domination. Released 40 years ago this year, it’s still one of the best documentaries ever made, mixing perspectives of ordinary French and Germans with the recollections of political figures such as Anthony Eden and Pierre Mendès-France.

Later fiction films started to explore the dramatic possibilities of a morally grey period in the nation’s life: Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien and Au revoir les enfants, alongside Truffaut’s Le dernier métro address very directly themes of antisemitism, collaboration and loyalty.

Scene from Le Chagrin et la Pitié

Novelists quickly recognised that in reality, many French citizens were, at best, ambivalent about the defeat in 1940 and Pétain’s armistice. Irène Némirovsky‘s Suite Française is  full of characters simply trying to retain their humanity as the tide of history swirls around them. In this maelström, Némirovsky depicts courage, cowardice and indifference as all valid reactions to circumstance. Given that Némirovsky never lived long enough to view the occupation with hindsight, her perspective is remarkably poignant.

Robert Sabatier‘s perennial hero Olivier Châteauneuf faces World War 2 as a stubborn but confused teenager in Olivier 1940: his experience of war is one of survival and frustration, punctuated by occasional adventures.  There is little heroism in Olivier’s war: he only accidentally joins the maquis right at the end of the novel. In La Douleur, Marguerite Duras evokes how a woman’s humanist concern for the chaos that engulfed Europe is submerged by personal grief and uncertainty about the return of her husband from deportation.

The reconsideration of France’s wartime story is explored on TV next month with the first 6 episodes of Philippe Triboit’s Un Village Français broadcast on France 3. This ongoing series promises to recount the life of a community in Vichy France throughout the entire war period. The promotional material focuses on the moral dilemmas faced by the characters, and I’m hoping it’s going to be as provocative as the books and films that have preceded it.

Possibly due to having too much free time and no other life, spoken word podcasts have become a little bit of an addiction, providing an easily digestible form of non-fiction and current affairs that doesn’t involve picking up a book.

None of the podcasts I subscribe to generally deal with music, although occasionally music does crop up, including Radio Open Source‘s tribute to Dave McKenna – recordings of, and interviews with, one of the finest solo jazz pianists of the past half century. Here’s a taste:

Dave McKenna: Blues (excerpt from Radio Open Source)

Listening to Lord Melvyn Bragg somewhere over northern Europe in 2006

A favourite format of mine is the long-form conversation, where two people talk for an hour or more, with minimal editing. In fact, the less production I hear, the more I enjoy the podcast. Over a couple of years, a regular listening schedule has developed that has effectively created a personalised on-demand radio station on my iPod. The lineup looks a bit like this:

• Electric Politics: George Kenney‘s weekly interview show is recommended for anyone looking for deeper perspectives on how America really works (or doesn’t). For better or worse, George’s show has done more to shape my political views over the past few years than any other single influence. Consistently illuminating
• Radio Open Source – Chris Lydon hosted the first ever podcast, and he still churns out interviews several times a week. Unashamedly “liberal” but very eclectic, some recent highlights include Mahmood Mamdani’s analysis of the Darfur phenomenon, and James Carroll on being an American and a Catholic today.
• NPR’s Speaking of Faith often posts soundfiles of its raw conversations, and I often find these more useful than the edited broadcast show.
• Knowledge@Wharton – Business and Economics themes from the staff at Wharton Business School
• In Our Time – Melvyn Bragg‘s Thursday morning roundtable about the forces shaping our intellectual world – science, theology, medicine, literature, philosphy, architecture. A show about everything, except for last week, when they talked about Nothing.
• This American Life – Andrew Dubber reckons this is the best radio show in the world. Who am I to argue?
• Rue des Entrepreneurs – Economic and business viewed through a spectacularly un-businesslike prism, every Saturday morning on France Inter
• Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 – OK, so I have a crush on Sandi Toksvig, alright?
• 2000 ans d’Histoire – Now I’m living in France, this weekday show helps in widening my understanding of the social, political and military history of the place.
• A Prairie Home Companion – Garrison Keillor‘s inimitable descriptions of life in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota.

I should probably make more of an effort to keep up with things back home in New Zealand – for instance maybe subscribing to Chris Laidlaw’s Sunday morning show on Radio NZ National? I’ll just have to find time to fit it into the schedule…

George Kenney (Image: Chad Evans Wyatt)

Lebanese-born author Amin Maalouf is the first commentator I’ve heard who frames the current financial crisis as a logical conclusion of the end of the Cold War.  His ideas are laid out in his most recent book (March 2009) Le dérèglement du monde : quand nos civilisations s’épuisent (“The world’s moral dissolution: when our civilisations exhaust themselves”).

Maalouf was interviewed for last Saturday’s Rue des Entrepreneurs on France Inter. Although his argument may be a little reductive, his thoughts were interesting enough that I transcribed them. An English translation is below, and a copy of my transcription is available if you want to check the accuracy.

Image: gavinandrewstewart (Creative Commons)

AMIN MAALOUF: “I think that the current economic crisis is a symptom of a moral dissoluteness, a dissoluteness which goes back a long time in history. It’s tricky to find the cause of an event, but it’s possible to date this [crisis] generally from the fall of the Berlin Wall.

[The fall of the Wall] was the end of a certain kind of world. At the end of an era like that you need to take stock and decide what you want to build on the rubble of the world that’s just collapsed. In reality, we didn’t do this.

I’m not nostalgic for the world prior to the fall of the wall. I consider that the Soviet system had manifestly failed in economic terms, that dirigisme had showed its limits. This can be seen in how China and India have started to develop themselves by getting rid of dirigisme.

Image: aur2899 (Creative Commons)

But at the same time, we came to the wrong conclusion. We thought that we could take the market to its logical conclusion – a market without limitations, without scruples. We unthreaded all the concerns, the idea of “social capitalism” – everything that had been accomplished within capitalism to humanise the system. We thought we had to roll all that back…

…at an intellectual level, it’s true that the fall of the Berlin Wall represented the end of a certain ideology, and I have no nostalgia for the ideology or for a world split between marxists and anti-marxists. Simply, we drew the conclusion that the era of ideologies was over. Everyone fell back on their loyalties, particularly religious loyalties. We find ourselves today in a world that’s difficult to live in, where our loyalties are expressed with violence.“

INTERVIEWER: “So [the fall of the wall was] a mistaken victory, you say?”

AM:“A mistaken victory in terms of economics, a mistaken victory in terms of ideology, as well as a mistaken victory for international relations. It was the end of a confrontation between two blocs, the triumph of a superpower who became the sole superpower. And at the same time the behavious of this superpower has not been above reproach! It’s difficult for people to behave properly when there’s nobody opposite them watching.“

Image: KCIvey (Creative Commons)

Image: Ben Harris-Roxas (Creative Commons)

On a recommendation, I recently ploughed through Robert McCammon‘s Boy’s Life. McCammon is not normally the sort of author that appeals to me, (not being a big fan of horror/fantasy). However Boy’s Life really worked. I loved its uncomplicated melding of magic and mundanity, its vivid descriptive tone and unforced evocation of life in smalltown Alabama in the 1960s.

Ostensibly a murder mystery, Boy’s Life is really a collection of episodes in the life of Cory, a 12 year-old kid who is discovering his calling as a storyteller. The book never loses this sense of wonder, slipping with ease between tales of summer days on the baseball diamond and back-yard conversations with ghosts. Cory’s Zephyr is a Harper Lee-style smalltown, refracted through a funhouse mirror: ineffectual sheriffs, snarling Klansmen and shotgun-wielding junk collectors share the stage with a ferocious river monster, flying dogs, an ancient voodoo witch and (of course) a dinosaur.

The suspense is occasionally stunning: some events in the novel are so completely unexpected that they strike with near-physical force.   Sometimes it seems that McCammon can’t resolve or propel the narrative forward without summoning hideous dei ex machina at the last minute. But this is barely a failing: it is in these moments of crisis that McCammon’s writing is strongest.

As a semi-autobiographical novel of a child growing into the world and confronting the gift and necessity of writing, Boy’s Life bears some comparison to David Mitchell‘s Black Swan Green.   Mitchell’s story of a year in the life of Worcestershire lad Jason Taylor is darker and more tightly-woven. But in both novels the boys’ imaginative universe is a small town, populated by near-mythical characters, presented against a backdrop of real-world outside events (in Zephyr it’s the civil rights movement and Vietnam; in Black Swan Green it’s 1980s Thatcherism and the Falklands War).

In an endearingly English way, Black Swan Green thrives on loose ends, ambiguity and Jason’s unease with his role in the world. The novel orbits around a dissolving marriage and inevitable divorce.

By contrast, Cory rides roughshod into danger and mystery, calls things as he sees them and seems implausibly unperturbed by frequent physical injuries. Boy’s Life possesses an almost conservative concern for family unity, culminating in a clunky epilogue in which the narrator returns to Zephyr 25 years later and we discover what’s happened to the main characters in the interim (basically: college, wedlock and socially respectable jobs).

Black Swan Green is, as a piece of art, more far subtle and definitely more interesting (I own an autographed hardback copy, ’nuff said). But Boy’s Life is immediately satisfying: a heartfelt romp through boyhood. In its best moments it’s dizzyingly good. Just watch out for dinosaurs.

Image: whateverthing (Creative Commons)

Cricket at Van Cortland Park in the Bronx (Image: kptyson)

Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland has been described as a ‘great American novel’.  I’m not quite sure Netherland carries the  thematic weight to grant it such immortality. But in its essential retelling of the story of an outsider’s insider whose pursuit of a Manhattan Dream is rendered hollow by corruption, Joseph O’Neill’s novel bears comparison to The Great Gatsby (I’m pretty chuffed I spotted the parallels before I read James Wood’s review in The New Yorker).

O’Neill’s Gatsby is Chuck Ramsikoon, a lyrically gifted Trinidadian-Indian whose grand scheme is to build a cricket stadium – “Bald Eagle Field” – in New York.  It is his friendship with the narrator, Dutch-born oil industry analyst Hans van den Broek, that drives the novel.  Instead of jazz-age Long Island, we find ourselves in a present day New York of immigrants – peopled by Indian bankers, Ukrainian real estate agents, Pakistani restauranteurs and Turkish angels.

Among this population of expatriated characters, cricket is a perfect metaphor for the lives of outsiders in America, played out on the boundaries of society. As Chuck says early in the novel: “You want a tast of how it feels to be a black man in this country? Put on the white clothes of a cricketer. Put on white to feel black.“

Image: caribb

The book is a skilfully written travelogue of linked memories, leaping from pre-Credit Crunch London to post-9/11 New York; from beach holidays in Kerala to childhood in well-ordered suburbs of The Hague. Jumps of place and time occur suddenly inside chapters and within paragraphs and sentences, and yet not once does the reader get lost. Everything hangs together.

The thing that prevents Netherland being a great novel is the numb self-obsession of the first person narrator. Although you see everything through his eyes and recollections, Hans as a person remains (for me) too cold and distant to feel real.  (Although O’Neill’s depiction of the often limpid life of the bachelor abroad is accurate enough !)

Netherland is undoubtedly a novel of its time: the touchstone moments of the pre-Obama age (the fall of the twin towers, the invasion of Iraq and the Indian Ocean tsunami)  are all present, exerting influence without ever being overplayed.  If humanity survives in good enough shape to produce literary critics in 50 years time, it may well be to Netherland that these critics turn to work out what the heck we were all thinking in the first decade of the 21st century.

Image: catface3

Choristers at Canterbury Cathedral, December 2008 (Photo: chrisjohnbeckett)

I’ve finally managed to finish Alan Mould’s The English Chorister. Mould’s book is likely the definitive history of boy choristers in England – a history that stretches to the first child oblates who sang the daily office alongside Benedictine monks in the monastery founded by Saint Augustine in Canterbury in the year 597.

Coursework reading meant that this book sat next to my bed all term, half-finished, until this week. But it was well worth perservering with, providing some insight into a musical tradition that formed a very important part of my early musical education.

The continuation of choristership over 14 centuries is unique to England – nowhere else in Europe today can claim a similar long-standing tradition.  But what becomes apparent in Mould’s history is the precarity of the choristers position for many centuries. Despite the demands of singing two services every day, choristers were often badly housed and fed, and until the 20th Century, little provision was made for their education.

Choristers also suffered through political and religious turmoil, including Viking raids on monasteries in the 7th century, or the open hostility of Tudor religious reformers. During the English Reformation, all trappings of Roman Catholic practice  were under threat in the newly protestant Church of England.  Choral worship probably only survived because Elizabeth I (a music fan) personally demanded that choirs not be disestablished – and today choristers still sing  the daily Canticles laid down in Thomas Cranmer’s 1552 Book of Common Prayer.

Today, it is estimated that at any given time, there are around 900 boys and girls in the UK involved in formal choristership – in cathedrals, Oxbridge colleges or the Royal Chapels.  Beyond the UK, a number of “English-style” choral foundations exist, notably at Saint Thomas Church in New York, Saint Andrews in Sydney and Christchurch Cathedral in New Zealand.

The one Anglican choir that undoubtedly receives more “airtime” each year than any other is the choir of King’s College, Cambridge.  On Christmas Eve, millions of people in the UK and around the world tune in for the live broadcast of the service of lessons and carols held in the college’s magnificent chapel.  A televised version is also recorded.  Here’s the choir a few years ago, singing Kenneth Leighton‘s arrangement of the Coventry Carol.

Luchino Visconti‘s Morte a Venezia is one of those few films that successfully manage to translate a book into cinema. When planning the film’s soundtrack, Visconti chose Mahler, whose death in 1911 partly inspired Thomas Mann’s novella. The main theme used is the 4th movement (Adagietto – sehr langsam) of Mahler’s 5th Symphony.

There’s a great anecdote about the soundtrack found in Bogarde’s biography at IMDB:

“when the lights went up in a Los Angeles screening room after a showing of “Death in Venice” for American executives, no one said anything. The silence encouraged Visconti, who believed it meant that the executives were undergoing a catharsis after watching his masterpiece.

However, he soon realized that, in Bogarde’s own words, “Apparently they were stunned into horrified silence.. A group of slumped nylon-suited men stared dully at the blank screen… One nervous executive, feeling something should be said, got up and asked: “Signore Visconti, who was responsible for the score of the film ?” — “Gustav Mahler“, Visconti replied. ” — “Just great”, said the nervous man. “I think we should sign him…”

Michael Chanan wrote in more detail about the links between Mann and Mahler in an article for Music and Musicians.

Death in Venice has become arguably Thomas Mann’s most famous and widely-read work. (Let’s face it, few people have the time and patience for Mann’s long-form novels like Buddenbrooks or Der Zauberberg.)

Similarly, Mahler’s 5th is undoubtedly the most-heard and widely-performed of his symphonies. After its premiere in Cologne in 1904, Mahler is reported to have said “Nobody understood it. I wish I could conduct the first performance fifty years after my death.” Thomas Mann might have shared comparable sentiments about his novella…

Björn Andrésen (Tadzio) and Dirk Bogarde (Gustav von Aschenbach)

The Discovery of France, by Graham Robb,
Picador, 2007 [Buy]

The Gorges du Tarn (Photo: Patrick Giraud)

The Gorges du Tarn in southern France are the largest canyon system in Europe, up to 500 metres deep and up to 1500 metres wide, cutting through the heart of the Cévennes. Yet the most amazing fact about this rather large piece of geology is that it was entirely unknown to the French government until 1905.

Until the 19th Century, vast expanses of France remained unexplored, inhabited by a peasant population strongly attached to their local pays, speaking myriad dialects and leading lives mostly independent of the elite minority ruling from Paris.

Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France describes how modern France began to coalesce into a coherent geographical, political and economic unit following the French Revolution. The story told by Robb is necessarily circuitous and complex, with many diversions into curious sub-plots that will suprise most Anglo-Saxon readers, (and probably many French readers too).

Robb is concerned to evoke the experience of the ‘everyday’ French citizen outside Paris, and illustrate how the new France (whether Napoleonic Empire or paternal République) not only brought enormous progress but also erased many lines of custom, territory and language that could be traced back 2 millenia to the time of the Roman Empire.

Shepherds on stilts in the Landes, southwest France

The Industrial Revolution arrived late in France, and witchcraft and Catholicism cohabited in the rural hinterland well into the late 19th century. In many places the village priest (always an outsider) was tolerated only because he was the sole person in the district who could read  – or speak – French.

During this slow emergence into the modern world, a majority of French citizens spoke languages other than French – including hundreds of dialects of Breton, Basque, Franco-Provençal, Alsatian and Occitan.  The introduction of a universal national education system in the mid-1800s was as much concerned with imposing the ‘civilised’ language of Paris on the population and elminating local patois as it was about implementing the republican ideals of equal opportunity.

The advance towards a unified nation occured in fits and starts, with many of the supposed agents of “progress” actually proving counter-productive. For example the building of new national roads and railways promoted growth of towns along their route, but actually served to impoverish and further isolate some regions, such as the Auvergne, which happened to be bypassed by the grand transport schemes launched from Paris.

Illustration from Francois Guizot’s Histoire de la civilisation en France (1830)

It is perhaps appropriate that it should be an English author who writes this story, for the English have for a long time had a complicated love affair with France. In fact many of the best source texts for descriptions of French landscape and society in the 18th and 19th centuries come from English explorers and writers.

Graham Robb accomplished his own exploration of France by bicycle, and he followed up his travels with 4 years of research. Despite 30+ pages of footnotes, the book remains incredibly readable.  As a specialist in 19th century French literature, Robb has written biographies of Victor Hugo, Rimbaud and Balzac (and wrote his Oxford doctorate in the field), but his writing is never laden by excessively academic concerns.

In some ways the entire book resembles a leisurely but thoughtful bicycle journey. Plenty of scope is allowed for detours to admire incidental details or episodes. Anecdotes and sideways leaps into ethnography, linguistics and cartography add spice to Robb’s storytelling. History is rarely linear, and when presented like this, it’s invariably fascinating.

After reading The Discovery of France, I was left feeling just slightly jealous, because Graham Robb has pretty much written exactly the sort of book that I’d love to write if I had the talent, time and brains.

Bilingual French/Breton road signs in Vannes

“At the junction of the state line of Colorado, its arid western one, and the state line of poor Utah I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fiery golden desert of eveningfall the great image of God with forefinger pointed straight at me through halos and rolls and gold folds that were like the existence of the gleaming spear in His right hand, and sayeth, Go thou across the ground; go moan for man; go moan, go groan, go groan alone go roll your bones, alone; go thou and be little beneath my sight; go thou, and be minute and as seed in the pod, but the pod the pit, world a Pod, universe a Pit; go thou, go though, die hence; and of Cody report you well and truly.”

-Jack Kerouac

YouTube is a trove of little gems, many of which would not be otherwise available to most of us. Here are a few videos related to Jack Kerouac.

Kerouac’s books were the first I read as a teenager that demonstrated an entirely new way of writing and describing the world. In quick sucession I read On the Road of course, Dharma Bums, and the weighty Visions of Cody, which I started on a long bus trip across the Arizona desert in 1996. (I recall that Miles’ Bitches Brew was on near-permanent loop on my walkman – heady times for a 17 year old).

The first video is one of the few extant films of Kerouac reading his own work, on the Steve Allen Show in 1959:

And although Kerouac was one of the writers who most deeply revolutionised the use of written English in the mid-20th Century, he was in fact francophone by birth. Born to immigrant Québecois parents in Massachusetts, he didn’t learn English until he went to school.  Here he is interviewed on Canadian TV in the mid-1960s, speaking the thick joual dialect of his childhood:

A documentary that seems worth seeing is the 1999 film The Source, recounting the origins and development of the Beat movement in the 1940s and 1950s, and the lives of Kerouac and his contemporaries such as Allan Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. This extract is set to music by British composer Mike Westbrook.

It’s obviously a fine novel, but it’s time to give up for the moment. After 3 months of listless effort, Middlemarch is going back on the shelf for a time when concentration and time is more generously available. Like when I’m drawing a pension.

Top 5 excuses for not finishing “Middlemarch” by George Eliot

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