Bitter Fruit is the story of the Ali family, set in South Africa during the investigations leading up to the Truth Committee Report. As a member of the political underground fighting apartheid, Silas was made witness to the rape of his wife Lydia, by a white policeman, of which their son Mickey is the product. Years later in a new South Africa by chance Silas sees the policeman from afar in a local supermarket and it is here the book begins.

This is an unhappy story of a dysfunctional family unit, which experiences shifts in the political landscape and enquiries into their past and future sense of self, in isolation of one another. Belonging does not exist for them, they have no sense of togetherness or unity as a family. A truly depressing portrayal of human relationships, it is however beautifully written. The narrative is neither tricksy or the language pretentious; the politics and themes are neither academic or showy, making this book a nice easy read. It is then up to the individual reader to layer their own interpretation with appropriate depth, to suit them.

The characters are also written with beautiful simplicity and thoughtfulness. These are individuals who revolve around one another, but who can’t seem to remember how or why they have a relationship. They base their actions on assumptions of what the other person is feeling or thinking, rather than any type of intimate knowledge. A marriage without love, a husband and wife who have drifted so far apart based on doing what they feel they should, rather than what they want or know to be true. Lydia and Silas are resentful of their circumstances, but each individual has no energy to confront the other.

When Lydia does eventually decide to leave Silas even then she is not entirely sure and telephones him, considering turning around and coming home. Her motives for this are not entirely sure though, other than the fact she is unable to trust her own judgement. Their son Mickey’s search for his ancestry leads him to manipulate information from his parents’ friends and colleagues and even resort to reading his mother’s diary, rather than talk directly with anyone. He has learnt to withhold his feelings and fears, as a result of his parents behaviour.

Without wanting to spoil the ending for any would be readers, his course of action doesn’t actually hold that many surprises plotwise, but as he becomes more secretive and extreme, the author still manages to create a fantastic sense of tension and empathy for him, which kept me turning the pages.

The character’s inability to communicate their feelings is acute and as the reader is privy to all their separate thoughts, rather frustrating. There were times when I wanted to climb inside the pages and give them all a good talking to, or send them off for family therapy. Achmat Dangor is so adept in the way he portrays characters that aren’t particularly likeable, yet still creates sympathy. These people are hard to like because they have such ineptitude for communication and uneasiness with emotion, but the author still managed to engage and hope things might improve for them.

However, I felt that they were going to continue to be desolate forever, rather like the characters in a Chekhov play, there is a lot of wallowing in self pity. The characters seem to almost enjoy their suffering. With out their resentments and guilt, I wondered where they’d end up?

There is a lot of sex in this book and I have heard Achmat Dangor’s writing described before as sensual and erotic. This for me was a great mystery. Make no mistake - the sex in Bitter Fruit is as lonely as the characters. Rape, child abuse, incest, secret sex between generations, Oedipus complexes, desperate one night stands up against walls - it’s all in there. So much so, that in the wrong hands, the screen version of the book could easily end up as ‘rollercoaster ride through love and tragedy’ or 3 part mini series. This is desolate sex where it is always an act of possession and need rather than one of communication, love or attraction.

The sex the characters experience is all about wanting something and taking it, rather than giving. The characters struggle with their sexuality and desire, no more comfortable with it than any other aspect of their selves it seems. Dangor avoids titillation though, and through his sensitive use of language helps the reader to understand his characters misplaced desires, escaping the sensational. For me, this was not stirring or sexy to read in anyway, just sad and slightly disconcerting.

Finally, why South Africa and the political backdrop? In many ways this is a universal story of fragile family life, unsatisfactory relationships and aloneness, which could be set anywhere. There is of course the author’s own political background and involvement with Mandela’s Childrens Fund to be taken into consideration, which partly explains it. I do not think apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, or the new South Africa which emerges during the story, is some blatant attempt at allegory for the disintegration of the Ali family or quest for identity on behalf of the author. I think there are more complex processes at play.

Bitter Fruit tells how political life can trickle into the personal at a micro level and how the characters battle with their mixed ethnicity to find their place in a society they are sure of. What is interesting, is how they can share their group struggle with the past through apartheid, but not their own conflicts on an individual level. The politics gives them a past in common, but as to who any of them are now - no-one seems quite sure or willing to discuss.

It is the individual’s ongoing search for a sense of ease with themselves and a need to belong, which strikes cords with the political situation in South Africa. What the reader takes from that is a matter of personal politics, but this book will certainly ask you questions. Be warned, I was left feeling quite hopeless for these people and this is not a story, which will cheer you up.

For my money this could be a Booker winner. It contains just the right mix of accessible writing with didactic themes, that will appeal to both popular culture and the more academic. I see the essay discussion questions coming thick and fast within critical discourse in the future, but it also has a bestseller ‘2 for 1’ feel about it. Then there’s the 3 part mini series…
 

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We have, in the world of highbrow fiction, lived so long with the slipknots, slipslops and general slipsliding away slipshoddiness of postmodern novels, self-reflexive texts and unreliable narrators that it is sheer relief to read a novel like this. Neil Cross’s fourth novel wants to tell a honest tale about decent blokes and the reality of human emotions such as love and grief.

Undoubtedly Cross succeeds in the second of these aims: the relationship between the father, Sam, and the son, Jamie, following the death of their respective wife and mother, Justine, from fatal familial insomnia (the inability to sleep, caused by rogue prions in the brain) is described with a subtle, sure touch. Cross knows when to be raw and judges well when to let in a metaphor such as the tender, tactile description of a father’s take on motherhood: ‘Instead he recalled the woman who married him, the woman inside whom his son had budded, a secret efflorescence, a polyp unfolding from nothing, reaching for the sun’. Cross also knows how to write the mundane and when to let the narrative be still enough for that mundane to breathe: ‘The sun was going down. Somewhere, somehow, Saturday night was beginning … By now they were on the second bottle and were watching a gameshow whose rules were too arcane for him to grasp and too sadistic for him to believe’.

Surprisingly, it is his valiant effort to write decently about men doing - or failing to do - the right thing that both touches most and disappoints most. By today’s standards at least, school bullying and the attendant angst-ridden hand-wringing is run of the mill and sure-fire fodder for any number of teen lit stories, short films and episodes of Grange Hill. Cross’s innovation is to look at a child being bullied through the eyes of a loving parent, who wants to act and finds he can’t. And it is in the point of action that Always the Sun disappoints most. Now whether or not this is Neil Cross’s fault is a point to be debated, but I suspect that it is not, that if you aim to write a true account of somebody trying to act in today’s climate of caution and uncertainty about where authority lies, it is bound to be a difficult task, short on inspiration.

Apart from finding one too many plot devices veering towards the wrong side of implausibility in the last thirty or so pages, I remain convinced that this is a novel that sets out to tell a truth about society. And that truth seems to be that we are so petrified of action, that when we do act we lose all perspective and rationality.

Would we act as Sam eventually acts: having had the conversation with the school teacher whose hands are tied by bureaucracy, whose heart is full of ‘contempt’ for those towards whom he exercises a duty of care, whose life is ‘empty’; having tried to talk man-to-man to the father of the bully and found the mores of male conversation misunderstood, unable to cope with working man’s advice to ‘let them sort out between them’ due to his own Guardian reader’s liberal mistrust; feeling helpless, angry and humiliated? What do you do when there is no sense of trust in society and your faith in yourself fails you?

This is a novel that addresses not just modern manhood but contemporary society. Cross shows us a society set in the industrial estates and grass verges of the modern market town, a society where even a ‘man’s man’ can become so mistrustful of other men - particularly working class men together - that bullying is not seen as children negotiating their way into adulthood, but as a root cancer in a society where even the strongest are afraid and mistrustful of each other and resort to mindless thuggery rather than adult argument.

Not much social inspiration or humanist aspiration here. But that is not the question to ask about a contemporary novel. The question to ask is: is this a true picture of society truthfully depicted by a good author? Probably. But this purely literary question also poses another, wider, more acute question: can good authors ever write beyond the limits of their time.

Fantasy novels seem to be filled with the battle between cultured, sensible enlightenment and the wild, natural, instinctual senses. In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell these two opposites represent the two sides that make up the nature of all things English. The book combines the content of magical fantasy and the civilised form of Austen’s social comedy. The two make an unlikely but fruitful marriage in this novel. The sharp wit and common sense of the form brings out the beauty and elusiveness of the fairytale elements and one is easily drawn into this alternative magical 18th century England, created with such intricate imagination that it seems as real as our own.

The story is long, winding and populated with detail. Norrell and Strange’s society resembles that of the Regency period, but their history is filled with magic and faery kingdoms. Studying magic is a gentleman’s pursuit, but actually to practise it would be dreadfully common; so practical magic has ceased to exist in England. When Mr Norrell emerges from reclusiveness, having taught himself through years of study to perform magic, he creates quite a stir. He proves his value to a rather hesitant English government by bringing the fiancee of a high-ranking politician back to life.

Set on retaining his monopoly of English magic, he buys up all books on magic in the country and constructs his own sanitised version of magic and what it should be used for. Reluctantly he eventually takes on a pupil - Jonathan Strange, a young gentleman whose natural gift for magic far exceeds the abilities of his teacher. While Norrell prefers to stay in his library, his pupil goes of to war to help Wellington in his battle against Napoleon.

Now actively practising what Norrell can only preach, Strange begins to rebel against his status as a mere apprentice. Spurred by his frustration at Norrell’s aversion to interact with faeries, the ancient sources of magic, he decides it is time to break with his teacher. While the conservative Norrell idly tries to keep magic contained in sensible rules of conduct, Strange begins a kafkaesque descend into the very bowels of the land of the faeries.

The story is peopled by an enormous cast of minor characters - a combination of fictional characters and historical figures like Byron. They remain however mostly caricatures ranging from ruthless social intriguants, arrogant yet useless aristocrats and intelligent but undervalued servants. The reason for this never-ending stream of new characters constantly to emerge, even near the end, is a mystery. Most of them seem to have no other function than to provide an ever richer tapestry of people distracting our attention from the main characters. The same goes for the footnotes that are scattered liberally throughout the book. The excessive succession of historical notes, references and explanations slackens the pace of the book. The whole book is both action-packed and incredibly slow in a curious way.

Instead of the style being used to explore and fully develop the characters, they seem to be created to fit it. Objectives are mostly straightforward, although many characters seem be curiously passive at crucial times. Both protagonists’ faults and strenghts are easily identified and drive the plot forward, yet they remain strangly bloodless beings. They never become human, they remain unable to move or truly touch us.

What the book exactly attempts to say about what it means to be English remains veiled in mystery as well. On the one hand it paints a society filled with a combination of shallow vanity, arrogance, provincialism and class prejudice, yet when Strange moves into the realms of natural wildness, we are shown little more then a savage world full of danger. Just quite how those two can come together to form quintessential Englishness is not quite clear. The ending seems to leave a lot of space for a sequel in which to explore this hinted-at symbioses.

Although the world created by Ms Clark is clever, witty and at places captivating, it meanders too much for the reader to care about the vitally important battle for the future of England and English magic, or the protagonists insued in the fight. Maybe the sheer vastness and complexity of Ms Clarke’s undertaking is enough to keep the attention of a seasoned fantasy audience, but this reader, though enchanted at first, was left wearied.

‘Like the best historical novels, it vividly captures the period yet resonates with the present’, enthuses the hype for Havoc, in its Third Year. It may be a whimsical suggestion, but what exactly is wrong with an old-fashioned swashbuckler that doesn’t resonate with the present?

Those that do can sometimes draw attention away from other features that are worth discussion. You feel obliged to remain ever alert, ready to exclaim the likeness between the book in your hands and the news on the TV screen. Although Ronan Bennett clearly knows how to write superior historical fiction without drowning in period detail, there is an obvious determination to link the past with the present that dominates the reputation of Havoc.

You can’t fail with the 1630s if you have a point to make about moral panics, crusades and persecution. Bennett uses an anonymous town and Puritan stronghold in the North of England to demonstrate the fear and civil unrest that such a climate incites. As coroner, secret Papist and a governor of the town, the sombre John Brigge instinctively casts himself as an outsider. Whilst others seek to maintain the strict laws of retribution he favours the fair trial and judgement of the numerous petty criminals that are arrested for their frivolous sinning.

Preferring to rest at his farm with his wife and newborn son, it is his relatively humane beliefs that motivate him to pursue his work. The town only offers danger, disorder and the threat of arrest, but Brigge doggedly perseveres with a coronary case involving an uncooperative Irishwoman accused of infanticide.

It is not Bennett’s desire to resonate with the present that makes this an interesting novel, but his obvious mastery of his chosen form. It is tempting at first to read his language as comical or even satirical (‘A pox on him and all his kind!’) He is however so confident and inventive with the style that it becomes churlish to mock. Details are meticulous and unobtrusive, as seasons and landscapes adopt an effortless 17th century hue.

Despite the chaos and hysteria, Bennett uses a moody and simmering tone. Initial impressions encourage the assumption that this is a historical thriller. Yet there is no conventional urgency to the intrigue surrounding Katherine Shay. Rather than increasing tension in the traditional manner, characters suffer from the sheer uncertainty of their personal and public lives.

The worlds that Brigge inhabits, and consequently the differing worldviews are deftly contrasted. Bennett is careful to emphasise that it is the quiet normality, realism and grasp of human nature that secures his special status. His farm is no twee, rural idyll, but bleak and sometimes overpoweringly silent and remote. It remains a haven for Brigge because it is a place where people are free to act and be punished by their own conscience.

In contrast, when he leaves the farm he is beset by an onslaught of cruelty and disorder. Here Bennett embraces a gruesome delight in his gory descriptions of Puritan suppression.

‘He turned and motioned to Doliffe, who came forward with the bridle. A cage for the head, a stone in weight, black-painted hoops of iron in the shape of a helmet. Brigge looked at the protrusion of spiked metal attached to the inner part of one of the lower bands, the bit that would stop Shay’s tongue. He had seen women retch and vomit when the bit was forced into their mouths and the bridle locked in place. He had seen smashed teeth and broken jaws and gashed lips and gums… “Breathe through your nose and try to be calm”, Brigge told her, “else you will choke and die”.’

Havoc, in its Third Year is less obvious and commonplace than it would first appear. You anticipate something straightforward, but it unexpectedly revolves around a mystery that loses momentum as it nears solution. Contemporary similarities are easy to find, but Bennett shows a more original imagination with his use of language and severe depictions of Puritan life. It is these more modest features that invite a second reading.

I generally hate novels about the working class: the writers either have a very low opinion of our intelligence, or they worship us as improbable saints. John Bemrose sees us as losers, the other extreme from that of Jack London’s The Iron Heel, whose hero Ernest Everhard fought the employers’ oligarchy, and won the boss’ daughter.

John Bemrose’s tale is centred on a factory, Bannerman’s Mills, at one time the largest knit-goods manufactory in Canada, recently taken over by a larger concern, its workers awaiting the inevitable re-organisation and redundancies. The hero Alfred Walker is a ‘fixer’, what here in Britain we would describe as a millwright or fitter, he is employed at the mill to repair and maintain the machines in the knitting mill. As a skilled worker he expects and gets deference from the semi-skilled ‘knitters’ (who need him to repair their knitting machines to enable them to carry on with their piece-work). They look to him to give a lead when the occasion arises.

The problem with getting Alf the fixer to give a lead is that he sees himself really as Alf the Foreman. His inclination is that of the old working class chant ‘The working class can kiss my arse; I’ve got the foreman’s job at last’. Anyone who expects him to lead them will have a long wait. The story opens as Dyson, a union organiser, appears at Alf’s home; from experience unions know that take-overs mean struggle and struggle means union members. Alf will have none of it, his ambition what it is. As the union organiser leaves, the tale introduces the Walker family, a family of losers.

Alf’s wife Margaret, the mother of his two sons Joe, eighteen, and Jamie, eight, is unable to get sexual pleasure from the act, which leads Alf to look elsewhere in the direction of the local ‘slapper’, whose eight year old half-breed Indian son Billie plays with Alf’s Jamie. Billie leads Jamie into the arms of Candyman John, the local paedophile. John, the teenager, meanwhile, falls in (unrequited) love with Annie, the daughter of one of the mill’s new managers. Unfortunately he has to try and win her from her rich, flashy car-owning, boyfriend. Now if this isn’t soap opera, I don’t know what is.

Of course they all come out as losers. Whilst Billie considers having the Candyman fellate him for toffees as combining pleasure with sustenance, no big deal, Jamie enters a life of nightmares and traumas. John loses the girl and walks off into the sunset (blimey we’re not going to have a sequel are we?), Alf gets burned to death when attempting a rescue, as some of the younger mill workers, angered at the mill’s closure, burn it down. Alf is then posthumously accused both by owners and workers of having a hand in the arson. Oh. No. How unjust!

First novels are traditionally autobiographical, so John Bemrose is probably as wimpish as his characters. The book was hailed in Canada as a beautiful, magical novel, which has caused me to view Canada henceforth as a wimpy version of the good old USA.

This account of the soul and its associated imagery in Classical and Christian culture is an unsatisfactory mix of bald description interspersed with the occasional unjustified assertion. Osmond, a lecturer at the University of London, and a regular contributor to the Roman Catholic magazine The Tablet, draws the erroneous conclusion from her survey that the longstanding reign of the soul in the West has been recently diminished by the rise of science. Instead, the mysterious soul has been dented by a contemporary upsurge in irrational anti-humanism.

From the outset, Osmond announces that she doesn’t intend to deal with any Oriental form of the soul, such as the reincarnated ‘atman’ of the Hindus. The book therefore commences with a brief allusion to the emergence of the soul among those primitive people who aspired to a life after death, and then rapidly proceeds – via ancient Egypt’s dual souls ‘Ka’ and ‘Ba’ – to a discussion of Greek philosophy’s divergent contributions to the familiar Christian notion of an individual soul belonging to each person.

Plato used the soul to distance mankind from ‘superficial’ materialism and physical relationships, and connect us – albeit tenuously – to the ‘reality’ of his elusive pristine Ideal Form. Aristotle, on the other hand, connected the soul – and therefore humanity – intimately to all Natural matter. So the fact that every acorn can potentially grow into an oak tree is proof enough that it possesses a soul acting to realise that latent aspiration. Medieval Christian theologians like Thomas Aquinas incorporated elements from both these traditions in order to establish the orthodox Roman Catholic stance on the soul. Platonic polemics privileging a vast cosmic deity were spiced with a hefty dose of Aristotelian pragmatism emphasising the incarnation of God as man in Jesus Christ, and the reincarnation of souls that would follow the Last Judgement. It was during the Middle Ages that the Christian soul and its fate played its largest role in people’s lives. Unfortunately, Osmond doesn’t say why she thinks that the soul was so important to that world.

The bulk of Imagining the Soul is taken up with descriptions of the various ways that people have depicted the soul throughout the ages. There are chapters on the soul as a beautiful woman; literary ‘debates’ between the body and the soul over who is the most responsible for evil; the soul as portrayed in medieval mystery and miracle plays; the soul as an art motif (a bird, a butterfly, a bridge, etc); the soul at death; contemporary visions of hell and paradise; and finally modern conceptions of the soul.

Osmond alludes in passing to the Romantic vision of a neo-Platonic soul serving as an inspirational font for creativity, but she dismisses this view as representative of the secular Enlightenment. Her conclusion is that every source of alienation we suffer is a product of the diminution of the soul by rationalism. The mind has been elevated over the soul, in Osmond’s opinion to the detriment of humanity. In many ways, her book could have been written fifty or even a hundred years ago. At least back then her complaint would have made sense.

‘Hell is other people’ quipped French existentialist John-Paul Sartre. It is modern misanthropy that diminishes Osmond’s soul, not scientific rationalism. The contemporary ‘self’ may fearlessly challenge the cosmologies of the established religions. But that vulnerable self also fears every other self it ever meets. Which is why contemporary humanity prefers to relate to itself (that is, individuals relate to each other) virtually, via imagery.

When Aristotle contended that everything natural has a soul, he was following a trail pioneered by primitive philosophers or shaman. If trees and mountains and animals can have feelings, in our modest times that permits humans to be soulful too. But the contemporary microcosm also upholds neo-Platonic anti-materialism in believing that only culture can be truly perceptive. So nowadays the arts cleverly manufacture a host of lifestyle identities with which we can distract unwelcome attention away from our fragile personae. In the end, we are hiding from ourselves.

The soul – what is it good for? Any decent rationalist should dismiss such a question out of hand with a resounding negation. And it is true that a rational society would have no need for souls, since in it humanity would always relate to each other consciously. But we don’t live in such a Utopia. To paraphrase Marx’s critique of Feuerbach, it is not enough to state that man makes religion. We also need to know why such creations are necessary to a particular society.

Like the contemporary self, the mystical mind which believed its soul would last for eternity was not a rational mind, yet that soul also reflected a progressive human trait which has been lost in our contemporary times – the sense that humanity at least shares some common interests.

It was the Metaphysical poet and Protestant convert John Donne who proclaimed that ‘No man is an island entire unto himself’. From primitive times to the Middle Ages human beings related to each other and to their society through the medium of their ‘souls’. It was this universalistic aspiration, rather than the prospect of eternal paradise or the fear of hell-fire after death, which explains the longevity of the medieval passion for souls. Eventually these relations came to be superseded by more potent ties promulgated by the nationalisms launched by the Enlightenment. Multicultural society, unlike previous societies, is unique in loathing itself. When the authorities treat us like beasts, they merely reflect the awful fact that we already regard each other in that way anyway. Our selfish soul is even more shrunken that the primitive soul, which could at least transcend itself and become a tree, a lake, a stream or a mountain. The doleful contemporary soul abhors itself. That’s about all it does. Imagine that.

On the surface, Clear is about Blaine and his box. The Above the Below circus at London’s Tower Bridge is backdrop; common curiosity drawing the characters into their strangely fractured discourses in its shadow; and a shared lexicon through which they interrogate each other. The narrator, Adair, is a paper pusher working for the mayor. His interest in the 40-day hunger fest follows from a Tupperware incident on a lunch break by the river, where he encounters the mysterious Aphra. In her seeming affinity with Blaine’s test of endurance she (and increasingly Blaine, too) becomes the object of our narrator’s affections.

It is an entertaining read if a) you do so before the oh so contemporary references lose their nowness; and b) you are able to feel smugly satisfied at your familiarity with the pop cultural markers - juxtaposed with laughably mystical pseudo-intellectualising - that litter it. The characters reveal themselves through the shorthand of what they wear, their CD collections and, in Adair’s case, the love sick compilations destined for his iPod.

But despite, or rather because this literary device renders the characters necessarily thinly drawn, they nevertheless seem real. We recognise them precisely because people do indeed sometimes seem compelled to define themselves in this way - you are what you eat, what not to wear - you get the idea. How else do you get to know ‘the real you’ when all the old ways of being someone eg. class, work, family, politics are so undermined by what has gone before?

The novel, for good or for bad, is very up to the minute - and breathtakingly so. Dizzee Rascal, who is to later gatecrash the Blaineathon as it comes to an end, wins the Mercury Prize. A year on, the tuned-in reader will know that Dizzee’s got a new critically acclaimed album out and the ageing Robert Wyatt collected the prestigious award. Perhaps this confirms the assertion by Adair’s impossibly cool flatmate, Solomon - an Ekow Eshun type - when he contends that ‘they’ wanted to neutralise the danger in Raskie’s underground appeal. Clear sometimes feels like a fictional equivalent of Eshun’s old magazine Arena, and would likely appeal to its rather knowingly hip, sophisticated mid 20s to 30 something readership. (OK, I used to read it.)

Despite this, by latching onto this illusionist-publicist’s narcissistic orgy - which, I think, is nevertheless of genuine significance as a cultural barometer of our times - Barker gets at a fundamental truth about the historical moment we are still living through. Blaine’s bizarre open-air installation generated both hostility and bafflement from the crowds and the tabloids alike, but never the indifference it deserved. He became a talking point, or as one character perceptively puts it - a blank slate onto which we project our own interpretations. And this is what each character proceeds to do, in the process drawing in the reader to similarly speculate on what the stunt was all about, who this Blaine character really is?

The world, after all, was witness 24/7 to a man encased in a perfectly transparent box, his every scratch and sniff beamed into our living rooms. In his classic The Fall of Public Man, Richard Sennett talks about the decline of public life - the rise of spectacle, and the strange bedfellows of isolation and transparency that Blaine in his Clear box - for me - so embodied. The performer is raised to new heights in the modern age (quite literally in this case) from his once lowly status not far removed from that of court jester - and where it might be argued with some justification, the likes of Blaine still belong. Sennett, rather unfairly in my view, accuses the rest of us of being reduced to inexpressive mesmerised spectators in awe of the exoticism of celebrity - however banal. And there is certainly an element of this in Barker’s book.

Engaging subject matter aside, it is a very readable if stylistically odd effort. The use of spacing - sometimes a couple of sentences to a page for emphasis - actually works well; though the point of the excessive italicisation when you least expect it was lost on me.

So enough of that.

Despite the comically painful and drawn out barstool philosophising on the Blaine phenomenon that the characters indulge each other in - the snappy dialogue keeps it agreeably pacey. But Clear is a peculiar novel - if anything, rather oblique. It simply isn’t clear what Barker is trying to do with it. Enjoyable as it is, the book is ultimately limited, especially with regards to any literary pretensions that might be presumed from its status on the Booker longlist.
 

If Nadeem Aslam had wanted to write a poorer version of Maps for Lost Lovers, one that was rather less subtly enthralling, he might also have wanted to call it ‘Culture Wars’. For the Muslim immigrants with whom he is concerned are shown to be at once at war with their England and with themselves, spawning a younger generation that they, apparently, will not allow to adjust adequately to life in a different civilisation.

Aslam’s vision is not a happy one, and his painting of it takes much getting used to. The influence of Rushdie, instructive metaphors threatening at times to drown the sense, is almost overpowering, but both reader and author can settle down together after a couple of chapters. That done, there is a plot that drives the action effectively, avoiding irritating contrivance. Shamas and Kaukab, immigrants from Pakistan, had a son living in sin with a neighbouring family’s daughter.

Returned ignominiously from a visit to Pakistan, Chanda and Jugnu are now missing and the circumstances around their murder allow us to see the depths of Shamas’ marriage. The scared bigotry of his wife has created a family that is so far out of joint that when she makes to stab her daughter Mah-Jabin, it seems only to be a horrifically predictable boiling over of a simmering bitterness.

It may appear strange to suggest that this book’s greatest strength is that it allows us to better understand racism and prejudice, rather than to combat it. But it realises, as surely we should, that a community’s least integrated fringes feel bewildered and hostile to a country with an utterly different moral code. Thus Kaukab, the real centre of the book, is shown to have utterly failed in bringing up her children, who were the point, she’d say with Allah, of her whole life. And yet she is the only person still alive and basically unchanged by the novel’s end. In taking that stance, obviously slightly liberal Aslam doles out to her the greatest punishment - that of being beyond redemption - and yet also leaves her alone with a torturing faith in a God whose ‘injustices’ she knows she cannot comprehend.

That’s what she wishes England - utterly foreign, outside her windows with its lingerie posters - would do. Showing her lying on this bed of nails made by a new country and her personally inadequate faith is instructive and painful to watch. But it is also a sad indictment of an England which, if not rejecting immigrants, too often makes them unwelcome and doesn’t realise that their ‘hostility’ is more likely nervous terror misspoken.

Like the moths of whom Jugnu was so fond, floating about this book, always reminding us of his presence, we should be enthralled by newcomers, understanding and engaging with them in our own inner cities as well as on National Geographic’s TV channels. That message may not be revolutionary, but all our understandings of its subtleties would be better off for the enchanting read that is Maps for Lost Lovers. Aslam portrays a family all too real, and his work narrows the yawning gaps between the disparate people that make up our society. Art may have produced better books, but it can scarcely have a higher purpose.

Debut novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie makes words work in this deceptively insightful novel. Her descriptive passages conjure up a sensual, nostalgic portrait of Nigeria in a time of cultural and political change.

Through the eyes of fifteen year-old Kambili, notions of freedom and religion are gently explored. We travel at child’s pace through sexual and political awakening, as they matter to her. But the novel goes beyond a simple coming-of-age story by realising the wider social and cultural events that reflect and inform this experience. Kambili must navigate her way through a complex of confusing and contradictory symbols just as Nigeria itself searches for unity amidst external imposition and internal unrest.

Kambili, her older brother Jaja and their mother live under the rule of their father, Eugene, a staunch Catholic and ‘omelora’ or ‘Big Man’ in their town, who instils authority in his household with a clenched fist and a leather-bound bible. He owns factories that sell fruit drinks, packaging an idea of Africa for the West.

Slowly, forces come into the children’s lives that challenge their understanding of both their father’s brand of discipline and their own ideas of freedom. They visit their Aunty Ifeoma, Papa’s sister, who lives a modest yet more fulfilling life in Nsukka with her three children. As a widow, Ifeoma brings up her children alone, yet the family is happy, noisy and outspoken. Here in Nsukka Kambili also meets the young Father Amadi, who offers a different interpretation of her father’s religion, intermingled with a sexuality that Kambili finds irresistible and terrifying at the same time.

Language mirrors this cultural interchange. At first, Igbo words - forbidden by Papa - mix uncomfortably with standard English, reflecting the speech of Kambili, who is little more than a mute in her father’s house. By the last section of the book, however, the narrator and the reader have become used to the Nigerian tongue and, without understanding all the words, the sounds feel right.

As a narrator Kambili is a triumph. A la mode, Adichie chose a child to narrate her story, believing an adult narrator might have appeared ‘too knowing’. Putting aside the inherent difficulties in writing ‘as a child’, Adichie masters the language and style of her central character beautifully. Forbidden to speak or think freely, Kambili’s inner world is made up of colourful, sensual, child-like observations. When her father smiles, for example, she delights in his face ‘breaking open like a coconut with the brilliant white meat inside’. She doesn’t labour to attach complicated meanings and judgements, avoiding overtly reflective passages, and the novel shines the brighter for this. In place of crude analysis, Kambili’s observations show the raw reality of growing up in, and growing out of, a proud country in a state of flux. Kambili’s naivety is purposefully frustrating, forcing the reader to disseminate the book’s messages through their own interpretation of her simplistic observations.

Although the narrator’s ignorance can be charming (when government intrusion forces The Standard to publish underground, she imagines a ‘dark, damp room…men bent over their desks, writing the truth’), Kambili isn’t merely the victim of this novel. Adichie allows her character depth by showing other consequences of enforced ‘innocence’, and at times Kambili’s naivety spills into self-righteousness. When the girls at school call her a ‘backyard snob’, they are only half-wrong. Although her piety is learnt from her father, it is Kambili’s responsibility to change. She must confront her own sexuality and accept autonomy in an environment that sees these as problematic. As much as Kambili is stifled by her father, she also relies on his rules to order her life. They prevent her from confronting her own changing body and the responsibility of forming a voice of her own, as her cousins do.

It would be all too easy for this novel to polarise two views: Africans against their oppressors, Father Eugene against Father Amadi, Catholic strictures from the West against traditional tribal codes. But Adichie is careful to show the grey areas, most powerfully through the character of Papa. He is not just a brutal disciplinarian; he can also be a loving father. Kambili and her brother cherish the ‘love sips’ he allows them from his teacup. At the same time, Mama’s best china is smashed in one of his furies. Papa can be a religious zealot, scalding his children’s feet with boiling water to show them what happens when they ‘walk in sin’. Yet he also believes in a ‘renewed democracy’ for Nigeria and opposes the corruption of the military government, using his paper The Standard as a mouthpiece for dissent. Aunty Ifoema herself admits, ‘it is the only paper that tells the truth’.

Of course, Eugene can’t see that his own household is a microcosm of the regime he opposes, caught himself between accepting wholesale the values and religion of the white man and justifying his own sense of national pride. He cannot embrace his ancestry, of which his traditionalist father is a constant reminder, because those were ‘pagan’ times. Yet, labouring to be ‘more like the white people’ is unsettling for a man who still sees his place at the head of his tribe.

Readers are also made to examine our reactions to oppression. The scenes at the family home are compelling, laced with suspense as the reader anticipates, perhaps even hopes for, another chilling attack from Papa. Achidie’s novel recognises that there is something fascinating about a tyrant; something perversely moreish about observing the way his victims justify his actions, paralysed by a mixture of fear and respect. When villagers speak about her father’s achievements Kambili glows with pride and wants to tell them that he is her father. Even as she waits to receive a punishment, Kambili looks at his eyes, ‘deep and sad’ and wishes she could ‘touch his face’ and ‘run [her] hand over his rubbery cheeks’. And as Eugene methodically pours boiling water over each of his children’s feet, he cries and tells them they are ‘precious’. Adichie recognises the notional value of freedom in a volatile environment where sometimes we’d prefer to be ruled.

Purple Hibiscus falters slightly at the close. In particular, the lack of attention to Jaja’s character, underdeveloped throughout the novel, deducts from Adichie’s smart final twist. Not punchy enough for a Booker winner perhaps, but a successful debut all the same, full of rich, original imagery lit up from within by a distinctive female lead.

There is something startling when first reading a James Wood review. Here is criticism of literature - from contemporary American or British novels, to nineteenth and early twentieth century translated works - that is not ordered by the two dominant voices of literary criticism today: those of the academics and the book reviewers.

From the former, texts are deconstructed or pillaged for a political or ideological relevance; the latter write merely to keep up with the publishing world, providing opinions, dustcover quotations and plot synopses, but using the criteria of the market - seeking out the sharp prose and conventional rebellions. Wood is outside both camps, even if his trajectory is the typical model for literary critics today: former chief literary editor at the Guardian, a judge for the Booker Prize in 1994, he has since moved to Washington where he writes and edits the New Republic books pages, as well as being a visiting lecturer at Harvard, and sitting on the editorial board of the London Review of Books.

It is his reviews that distinguish him from most of his colleagues, as he is concerned primarily with the aesthetic merit of a novel-those seemingly old-fashioned concerns over just how well a book is written, how convincingly developed its characters are and how successfully the author’s original intentions have translated onto the page, through the novel’s unique device of storytelling. This approach necessitates at once a comparative perspective, and this by definition means imposing a hierarchy in the world of letters - understanding literature as a changing form, with past and present masters as well as their forgettable pretenders.

The Irresponsible Self is Wood’s second published collection of essays, some of which appeared originally in the London Review of Books. The Broken Estate (1999) focused on a theme he has been preoccupied enough by to integrate into his first novel, The Book Against God (2003): the connection between literature and religious belief. Both collections are historical as well as contemporary in scope, with discussions ranging from contemporary authors to the modernists, romantics and Shakespeare.

The Irresponsible Self has as its organising strain, ‘laughter and the novel’, or, more specifically and less succinctly put, how the novel provokes the reader’s laughter, how characters are developed and language used - essentially how stories are told in order to develop a relationship between reader and the work that causes the former to laugh. To investigate this, Wood distinguishes between a ‘comedy of forgiveness’, more European in its origins, that laughs with characters, and a ‘comedy of correction’, from the Anglo-American tradition, that involves laughing at them - the former is the result of complicity between reader and character, a merging of them, rather than the detached amusement of the latter.

Apart from their geographical origins, there is a loose historical development from one type of comedy to another that runs in parallel with the shift from a religious to a secular society. Although the comedy of correction does perdure, with writers such as Evelyn Waugh, Margaret Atwood, Muriel Spark and Kingsley Amis, it is essentially religious in nature, and what makes something funny is a digression from a stable centre; there exists a transparent moral framework which provides the grounds for complicity between author and reader almost against the fiction’s characters.

The comedy of forgiveness has no such luxurious certitude. Complicity has to be worked for because this comic form (though its roots are in Shakespeare’s soliloquys) emerged in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, and is a product of the modern novel that, in the secular shift, expressed doubt over the nature and stability of self. For the novel, the suggestion that we have ‘bottomless interiors which may only be partially disclosed’ encouraged writers to expand the fictive inner lives of characters.

Chekhov, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Gogol are all modern examples who developed a comedy of forgiveness to manage the new incomprehension. It is through an ‘unreliably unreliable narrator’ that the comedy of forgiveness is deployed - the reader is lured into a sense of complete comprehension of character (and thus open to the comedy of correction) only to be surprised into doubt by an event or action. For Wood this moves one more deeply than any comedy of correction because it is a kind of ‘broken humour’ as Freud would have it, a sympathy developed for characters that is blocked by a comic moment, but that exists nevertheless as sympathy, and the laughter is ‘through tears’.

Contained within this framework are the essential elements of Wood’s own critical criteria for engaging with and judging literature. The focus on comedy really expresses a concern for what conditions are necessary to develop complicity, how the relationship between author and reader is developed through the words and stories. Nothing worse than the isolation of the absurd, as shown by Albert Camus in L’Etranger (1942), when Meursault watches a man behind a pane of glass, gesticulating on the phone. Unable to hear his words, Meursault is left only to wonder, ‘why he is even alive’. But this uncertainty does at least keep you guessing and the triumphant creation of modern fiction for Wood is:

characters who are free to contradict themselves without being corrected by the author . . . free to make mistakes without fearing authorial judgement . . . In such fiction, the reader is not to be overly helped . . . We must find out for ourselves how much we know of character.

As a reader, you have to do some work, not so much of the theoretical kind - as many contemporary novels tend to encourage, tied to an abstract idea - but primarily through empathy. This inhabitation of character of course requires a quality in the literature to capture the reader’s belief, and also that the author has fully understood his own creations, and given them enough depth to be believable, contrasting successfully their character’s consciousness with a reality that is independent of them. It is unsurprising then to hear Wood defend realism, and suggest that in and amongst the plethora of literary genres, realism, essentially, ‘is narrative’s great master . . . it schools even its own truants [such as magical realism] . . . [it] is already magical, an artifice-in-waiting’ (‘Credulity’, LRB, 14th November 2002, vol. 24, no. 22). So, deeper still what orders Wood’s literary criteria is the truthfulness of a work, its foothold in reality.

In his analysis of contemporary novelists such as Jonathan Franzen, Tom Wolfe, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith, Wood draws out, through very close attention to language, the reasons why such writers fail to manage the challenge of the modern world and its incertitudes. Again the invocation of the aesthetic concerns are somewhat startling, to read praise for wonderful similes, disgust at ‘sophomoric comparisons’, misplaced crudity or objections against the cheap use of ‘expensive’ adjectives or adverbs.

This close reading of the text as art, rather than in order to deconstruct it, jars with an instrumental use of the novel by authors keener to illuminate social or political ideas underpinning or influencing their work. Wood is particularly keen to expose the intervention of the author who may, in riffs of style, an efflorescence of theory, a misplaced observation, speak over their characters, reduce or even obliterate them - an external imposition on that sacred interior of character the modern novel has the potential to create. At times Wood can labour this point. DBC Pierre, Yann Martel, Zadie Smith - every time their error is the same, ‘“Beat” is not Samad’s word’, the argument goes, ‘he would never use it . . . Smith is not writing from inside [his] head . . .’.

This is, however, an extremely strong criticism to make of any author - they have misjudged their own creation, like a parent not knowing their child. It is such a rare attack because it demands the critic’s certainty that he has understood the author’s characters better; the critic knows what Samad would say. In part this suggests a paradox: surely Smith can’t have obliterated Samad if the critic is still able to get such an acute sense of him, so by defending the novel’s characters the work itself is elevated not disparaged, or at least its possibilities imagined. But this is less contradictory if one appreciates the distinction between reviewing and criticism: whilst reviewing can ‘only hinder what it has not made’ by saying a(n already existing) work is good or bad, criticism is an act of competition, often between writers, the sort Virginia Woolf embodied in her early years at the Times Literary Supplement, ‘pushing her own project’ when she wrote, preparing ‘her own kind of novel’ (‘Phut-Phut’, London Review of Books, 27th June 2002, vol. 24, no. 12). Criticism then, holds a radical potential, demanding something different from what is being produced, by engaging in a concrete struggle with what actually exists.

What guides Wood’s criticism is not a paradoxical elevation of the work, but both his own expectations of what literature can achieve and a dedication to understanding the intention of its author. The nature of intentionality is not, of course, a historical constant. Plenty of writers have claimed they ‘just write’ and shied away from explicit theoretical or political positions - Alan Hollinghurst avoids being called to account describing his first novel The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) as not about gay history but just about ‘one gay man’. Hanif Kureshi similarily claims ‘I can’t think of myself as a post-colonial writer. When I go upstairs to my study, I think, ‘What do I want to write about today?’ I can’t think about myself or my work theoretically’ (Contemporary British and Irish Fiction, pp. 75 and 93) - but there have been literary movements and experimentations with style, as well as political, philosophical and social novels that use the form with very different objectives.

Wood’s most well-known essay in The Irresponsible Self, ‘Hysterical realism’, characterises a certain trend he has discerned in contemporary British and American fiction. The father of this recent strain is Dickens, the overwhelming influence on-especially British-postwar fiction according to Wood, whose novels were ‘populated by vital simplicities’, a masterly display of caricature over character. Dickens demonstrated ‘how to get a character launched’, propelling him into the fray, though ‘not [showing] how to keep him afloat’, and for aspiring novelists ‘this glittering liveliness is simply easier to copy’. Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Pynchon, David Forster Wallace, Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie are examples open to George Orwell’s criticism of Dickens, that he had ‘rotten architecture but great gargoyles’.

These contemporary writers are engaged in excesses of invention and their narratives driven by vitality alone, the architecture, the form of the novel is ‘essential silliness’ in the lunge for multitudes-in all the detail there is an absence of moral seriousness. ‘The “big contemporary novel” is a perpetual motor machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence’. Stories are lit from every spark of detail and storytelling has become the grammar of the novel. But in contrast to magical realism, every story in itself is plausible, ‘the conventions of realism are not being abolished but . . . exhausted, overworked’ and the results are novels full of that oxymoron, ‘inhuman stories’. Characters have thrust upon them an overflowing amount of banalities, of information, connections, ideas.

The sources of hysterical realism seem to be a mixture of literary doubt - an awkwardness generally about the possibilities of storytelling and its various constituents - to a broader paranoia that orders the worldview of some writers, and spills onto the pages of their fictions. DeLillo’s Underworld captures this, the ‘Frankfurt school entertainer’ weaves such an insidious web of connectedness that the stories, ‘enforcing [links] which are finally merely conceptual rather than human’ conjure up a political butterfly effect, a global world populated by powerless citizens. Hysterical realism also reflects the influence academia’s takeover of literary criticism has had on writing, the emphasis on ideas and broader themes that has become the novel’s job to illuminate - the interest in particular perspectives, hybridity, the global economy and its insidious nature, or the redundancy of roots in a multiracial world.

This sort of analysis in part rids one of a nagging worry when reading some of Wood’s criticism - is he essentially conservative? Talking of character against caricature, searching for beautiful language (from which any social or political points will flow but ought never to be implicit), praising Monica Ali’s Brick Lane but characterising it clearly as a return to the fiction of the nineteenth century, this immigration-centred literature ‘re-importing into the Western novel traditional societies, with their ties of marriage, burdens of religion, obligations of civil duty and pressures of propriety’. It can feel at times that Wood judges with the ideal novel in mind, from a time gone by, and his objective standards need some airing, some re-thinking. But what is most ‘old-fashioned’ is effectively what jars with the present times: defending art for art’s sake.

The notion of art’s autonomy does have its roots in conservativism, and clings to a picture of the artist as isolated from life and society that is most appealing of course, when in a privileged position to have the choice between the two. More positively however, the position also necessitates an acknowledgement of art’s limitations - literature is not politics, nor philosophy, it does not deal uniquely in theory or abstractedness, but ought to be determined ‘to trade in narrative’, and via that narrative, via the uniqueness of literature, illumination (‘A Frog’s Life, LRB, 23rd October 2003, vol. 25). Philosophical novels such as L’Etranger, or the epic social novels by John Steinbeck are also works of art because they dealt with their concerns in a literary way. And whilst one can then debate over how isolated or engaged the artist should be, the first challenge is believing at least in the possibilities of literature as literature.

The hyperbole of hysterical realism conceals an unwillingness to endorse such a conceptualisation of art - the detachment or isolation of an artist is not even a partly radical stance, alienated from society because of a disagreement with its conventions, as the outsider-as-dissident in the sixties typified, but, precisely because the opposing force is so nebulous (the values of a society asserted with no confidence or authority), the role of art, the objective for writers, is to make sense of the world as it is, ‘tell us how it works’ and tie ideas and themes together, ‘problem solving from other places and worlds’.

According to Zadie Smith the greatest contribution from writers such as David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers is that ‘these guys . . . understand macro-microeconomics, the way the internet works, math, philosophy [as well as] the street, the family, love, sex . . .’ (Contemporary British and Irish Fiction, p175). The writer should be implicated, informed - a journalist more than an artist, commenting on the world, revealing its intricate connectedness and putting events clearly into the context of a broad political or philosophical paradigm. For Wood this is too utilitarian and if characterisation is attended to enough and successfully the social commentary should always leak out, being already embedded in the material itself, drawing, as earlier suggested, from a realist base.

The social conscience and journalistic impulses of writers marr the attempts to produce great literature because this use of ready-made information, of commentary, portrays an immediately obvious aspect of reality, and ‘when the surface of life is only experienced immediately it remains opaque, fragmentary, chaotic and uncomprehended’ (Lukàcs, from Aesthetics and Politics: The key texts of the classic debate in German Marxism, 1977, p39).

But at the same time to ‘take refuge in sentences’ requires that one is equally wary of another, not unrelated, extreme: artistic narcissism. Commenting on the latest publication from John Updike in 2001, Wood tires quickly of the ‘essayistic saunter’ typical of his work. Updike, eager to find the ‘best’ word for his descriptions or dialogue is ‘more interested in [his prose’s] smooth continuation than in registering metaphysical or emotional interruption’ (‘Gossip in Gilt’, LRB, 19th April, 2001, vol. 23, no. 8).

When a writer is such a stylist, like Updike, the tension between the author’s talents and his character’s voices is exacerbated. Any writer, unlike a poet, must juggle between the literal and the literary, as prose ‘always forces the question: who is thinking in these particular words and why? Point of view . . . is the densest riddle for the novelist’, either employing a first- or third-person narrative to (in)directly ascribe it. Whilst the poet is more an egotist then, his words flowing from himself, the novelist must be altruistic and strive to divert attention from, rather than draw attention to himself.

Altruism has been little cultivated in the vacillations over artistic purpose. Another characteristic form employed by contemporary writers has been the self-interrogatory, self-ironic, genre-mocking projects, a recent example being Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking work of Staggering Genius (2000). But books written with excessive self-consciousness, Wood argues, lack the presence of actual selves, of the human, because - one can infer, though Wood does not say so - because the writer is not engaging in a struggle, his convictions at stake, so much as a self-serving game without consequences.

It is through his recourse to character, his weariness of gargoyles, that Wood attacks these flat, self-conscious works, but in his defence of character, Wood does not satisfactorily acknowledge the very actuality of the problem, and seems instead to encourage a leap of faith, a loose reappraisal of value and the value of fiction, of art for its own sake. Discussing the relationship between animals and humans in his review of JM Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, Wood sides with its protagonist who asks that we ‘enter the frog’s life’ which ‘is like entering the fictional character’s life’, it is a willingness to believe in something that cannot believe in you. Not only is this quasi-religious dedication unappealing, but any reappraisal is impossible without an understanding of the changes that have given rise to the self-less novels.

Wood characterises them aptly, but often with a hint of detached irony, these ‘curiously arrested books which know a thousand different things but do not know a single human being’ (190-1), a little like ‘a man who takes so many classes he has no time to read’ (195). His characterisation is suggestive of the current confusion in literary criticism as much as literature, but it remains only suggestive, demoting the crisis to a curiosity (if only we took more care over character…). But what Wood does not apprehend - what the hysterical realists have in part grasped, but fail on a literary level to explore - and where his conservatism does seem to be confirmed, is that however great a literary realist you are, social reality cannot anymore be revealed through character alone, because part of social reality is the very absence of the subjectivity that character requires.

What other methods have been employed to apprehend social reality by writers not involved in the embarrassed charades of hysterical realism? One who unblinkingly stares at the social vacuum is the French author, Michel Houellebecq, though further, revelatory problems arise in a consideration of his own work. At first glance he seems the opposite of any Rushdie or Smith: his prose is austere rather than vivacious, his characters are deflated not hyperactive, or hyperactively described, he is uninterested in populating stories with the heteroglossia of postmodern fiction, and does not take the marginalised as his subjects but resurrects from the metropolis the dead white male.

Houellebecq has effectively ‘dispensed with the ‘deep’ subject [and] its ethical and affective corollaries’, the very object Wood fights for. His characters mimic the depthlessness Jean Baudrillard described in 1985, claiming an end to reflexive transcendence, ‘today the scene and mirror no longer exist; instead, there is a screen and network . . . a non-reflecting surface . . . where operations unfold’ (‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, in Hal Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture, 1985). Consequently Houellebecq’s narrator states, ‘I will not charm [the reader] with subtle psychological observations’, these having become obsolete in a world of media, gadgets and homogeneity (Extension du domaine de la lutte, 1994).

The life-situations of his characters are not only rendered flatly in a style that is a matter of principle, an expression of sentiment and outlook, they are understood socio-economically, which presents their actions - despite the witty, acute commentaries that suggest a level of awareness and critical distance - as determined. Already we have encountered the problem of excessive self-consciousness, but what these works produce is a so-called ‘surplus consciousness’ as Martin Ryle calls it. ’[T]he critical consciousness apprehends the subject as fully embedded in the social, [it seems that it cannot] apprehend itself as anything but surplus consciousness ... unable to affect anything’ (‘Surplus Consciousness’, Radical Philosophy, July/August 2004, no. 126)

In defence of Houellebecq, Ryle argues that despite his characters’ lack of agency, the blankness of narrative delivery is so unsettling that it actively provokes the reader into interpretation, the blankness is both ‘banal and monstrous’ so to reproduce it, to not ask the ethical and political questions would be to perpetuate the protagonist’s resignation. A reader is thus ‘produced’ by the very banality of the text. By a very different method Wood’s Jamesian tenet that good fiction can reach out and act on the morality of its readers, it is suggested here, is possible via this explicitly depthless fiction. But whilst provoked into anger, or laughter, does anything more substantial comes from this reaction than the impasse of startled entertainment resulting from a DeLillo or Smith novel?

Houellebecq for his part, is not about to dedicate himself to the ‘frog’s life’, as he has severed all ties between reader, author and characters, but having nothing concrete to offer in its place, no convictions to make his architecture any less rotten, he seems more a polemicist playing at the fiction-writer’s game than a writer responding and reworking the medium’s troubled base.

‘What matters’, Georg Lukàcs argued, ‘is that the slice of life shaped and depicted by the artist and re-experienced by the reader should reveal the relations between appearance and essence without need for any external commentary’ (Aesthetics and Politics, pp. 33-34). Jonathan Franzen’s overly conscious attempt to write a ‘social novel’ with The Corrections (2001) thus sidesteps the key challenge of any writer: once the deeper, hidden, mediated perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society have been discerned ’[the writer] must artistically conceal the relationships he has just discovered through the process of abstraction . . . this is the dialectic of appearance and essence [and] the richer, the more . . . complex and cunning [it] is, the more firmly it grasps hold of the living contradictions of life and society, then the . . . more profound the realism will be’ (p. 39).

Houellebecq then is just lazy, or perhaps, as Perry Anderson suggests ‘by a cursory glance at his poetry’, doesn’t have the ability to do otherwise. (‘Déringolade’, LRB, 2 September 2004, vol. 26, no. 17) The hysterical realists may be gifted writers, but they are not able to translate their understanding of the world in a truly literary way, without debasing the form in the name of, for example, macro-microeconomics.

The major problem with the notion of ‘surplus consciousness’ is the suggestion that the embedding of a character’s subjectivity in the social is a challenge to his agency. In fact, one should consider the contrary, that the objective of literature, its emancipatory potential, and thus the measure of authors’ success, is the ability to understand and reveal the connection between the two. Wood would surely support this approach, but he stops short of pushing his literary criticism to make any broader diagnosis.

The Wizard of Pop is a musical crossing Pop Idol with The Wizard of Oz, and is a creditable example of youth/community arts. Written by Kim Birtley and adapted by Fran Nothard and the Toasted Drama Group, this is a highly enjoyable show, wittily parodying a familiar storyline with reference to contemporary pop culture.

The story centres on birthday girl Lucy, played by Heather Cairns, who is magically transported to the Land of Pop when the electricity cuts out during her party (she has forgotten to buy a powercard). The moment of transformation is accompanied by a strobe lit ensemble performance of ‘Thriller’ led by wicked witch Eminem, played by Corrina Cook. Lucy’s entry to the Land of Pop results in the death of Eminem’s friend, represented by a pair of giant upturned papier-mache feet.

Lucy then finds herself on a Musical Road that leads to Craigmillar Castle. There lurks Simon Cowell, the Wizard of Pop himself, played with comic fretfulness by Mark McGregor. To return home Lucy has to reach the castle and become Britney Spears for the day. The Musical Road is studded not with yellow bricks, but shiny stars. Treading on a star causes a pop act to appear, and of course Lucy’s curiosity makes her dally on the Road and summon each pop star in turn. Mark McGregor shows his versatility by appearing as Elton John, and proves to be a fine performer with a very good voice.

At this point, though, a night seemingly devoted to entertainment for entertainment’s sake takes a detour that jars. Local girl group Niddrie Born Bitches appear with a parody of ‘Slim Shady’. The delivery is good but the message borders on unpalatable. The refrain of ‘My neighbours are lazy’ and references to antisocial behaviour smack of New Labour preaching and detract briefly from the show as a whole.

Eminem reappears twice to thwart Lucy and twice she is rescued. First Holly Valance (Hayley Forbes) and the Black Eyed Peas (Rory Cosgrove and James Milligan) step in. Later on Busted (Darren Burns, Rachel Hartley, Fran Nothard and Shelley Nothard) raise some audience chuckles by socking the sinister rapper with their inflatable guitars. It could be said that that the treatment of Eminem in the plot chimes with the hectoring tone of the Niddrie Born Bitches’ pastiche, but on balance Eminem is an ideal pantomime villain, as indeed he is in the real life pop firmament.

The funniest performance of the night is provided by the Atomic Grans (Karen Davidson, Corrina Cook and Rachel Hartley) creaking around the stage on crutches and a scooter. Upon reaching the castle, a flustered Simon Cowell looking in vain for Jordan grants Lucy her Britney Spears birthday wish. Lucy’s performance as Britney enables her to return home where of course she discover it has all been a dream. Confused, she tries to explain that her mum (Fran Nothard) is Cher in the Land of Pop. A happy ending is signalled as the entire cast sings ‘Stand By Me’ and Holly Valance marries Eminem in pop heaven. Even Lucy’s killjoy next door neighbour stops complaining about the party and joins the celebration.

Quite right. All the performances are good and a few like that of Mark McGregor are excellent . Hopefully next time the Niddrie Born Bitches will get their hands on better material. Director Nikki Barnes of Craigmillar Community Arts said of the show: ‘To see the performers, some of whom had no drama experience, progress to singing and dancing, is what community drama is all about.’ Nikki hopes to build on what has been achieved with the theatre school ‘Circle of Arts’ due to open at Craigmillar Community Arts in May.

23 March 2004.

Open a copy of Time Out or a broadsheet entertainment listings supplement at any point of the year and it is possible to find up to six or seven off-West End musical theatre shows running concurrently. This is, of course, in addition and contrast to the large-scale blockbusters at the major theatres; here instead is a world of pub-theatre cabarets, experimental combinations of music and drama, and productions relying on the quality of the performance and the material in place of expensive spectaculars and vast choruses.

Having seen Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris at the Landor Theatre and Stephen Sondheim’s Passion at the Bridewell on consecutive nights, it struck me that here were two defining and yet completely differing examples of London fringe musical theatre. Both also add a variety of points to any discussion of the worth and value of musical theatre as a dramatic form. Jacques Brel is in essence, a cabaret, a revue, a selection of the songs of Brel arranged, as is often the case in this type of show, around a fairly tenuous setting and plotline.

The setting: a confusing alternation between an aspiring ‘Eurocafé’ in England, and the real thing in Paris (complete with red and white checked tablecloths and escargots on the menu). The plotline: meetings and reminiscences of a group of friends and lovers. The main interest of the evening for me came in the form of a question: was it a successful example of portraying a set of universal ideas and themes?

This question was mainly inspired by attempts to do exactly this - the director has adapted the translations of Brel’s lyrics to more contemporary standards and attempted to make the interpretations of the songs as accessible and relevant to modern living as possible. However, how much of this was due to the original input from the director and how much was innately in Brel’s lyrics is the interesting debate. Brel covers a wide array of the ‘grand thèmes’ - love, betrayal, the class system, war - several of which lend themselves to pertinently contemporary interpretations; having said that, it would be hard to find a time when the line ‘if we only have love, we can melt all the guns’ could not be related to a current conflict, despite all its sickly-sweet trappings of sentimentality.

But maybe it is this innate sentimentality that makes musicals so successful. No-one can deny that the form itself, although perhaps in creative crisis at present, has never been anything but tremendously popular. The pairing of serious, thought-provoking, and sometimes profound ideas, set to entertaining music and spectacle should, in many ways, be the perfect dramatic art form - indeed, this is one of the main arguments given to the elevation of opera. And yet musical theatre is far from wielding the same cultural implications as opera, despite their shared fusion of music and dramatic stimuli.

Passion is, along with Sweeney Todd, one of Sondheim’s more operatic shows, with the character of Fosca providing the tragic heroine, wracked with mysterious illness and doomed to the fate of unrequited love. The show clearly aims to deal with universal ideas about the nature of love, need and desire. The plaintive yearning and (for want of a more imaginative word) passion felt in the music mirrors Sondheim’s dramatic concerns explicitly. The Bridewell production begins with the two lovers, Giorgio and Clara, in bed, but without the typical Hollywood touches of modesty such as carefully arranged sheets, extraneous underwear, or strategically placed props. Instead, both the actors are entirely naked and unabashed, immediately establishing a sense of universal humanity through the lack of temporal or geographical implications that would go with clothes or a detailed set. The metanarratives of love, relationships, loyalty and betrayal are all present in this one, ageless scenario of two lovers, exposed and open to each other as well as the audience.

The production goes on from this initial statement and add the nuances of human behaviour that make these universal concepts into a piece of drama, rather than remaining abstract. The singing is near-faultless, and the brash barracks behaviour of the male chorus is the perfect contrast to Giorgio’s tortured affairs of the heart. All of which helps point to the argument for music theatre’s perfect duality of drama and entertainment, as laid out above - it was an evening which managed to provoke passionate discussion about the differing natures of love as well as providing humour, emotion, and musical inspiration.

Why then is the type of music theatre exemplified by the productions at the Bridewell in such an unstable position in London’s cultural milieu? Accepting the commercial success of nearly every big-time West End show running at the moment, why should institutions encouraging high-quality, low-budget alternatives such as the Bridewell and the BAC (where Jerry Springer The Opera was first conceived and developed) be constantly on the brink of financial crisis? The Bridewell recently overcame difficulties by raising £50 000 through a public fundraising campaign and receiving £30 000 each from the Arts Council and the Corporation of London. While this shows the support and enthusiasm that evidently exists for musical theatre, these funds will only solve the Bridewell’s problems for one year, meaning the whole charade will begin again in twelve months. Meanwhile, BAC has had to respond to a cut in its funding with similar appeals to the public.

The pub-theatre and cabaret circuit of musicals, where Jacques Brel seems to fit in, seems much healthier, perhaps because it has a much more straightforwardly entertaining purpose. At times, Jacques Brel could be a student revue, or a good amateur effort, but this doesn’t detract from the production as there is enough enthusiasm, life and energy to carry it. Despite its general lack of dramatic involvement with complex issues - apart from Brel’s inherently engaging lyrics - it shows a genuine cabaret spirit, using the form of song to display a wide and convincing range of emotion.

It is very easy to argue that demand will result from the creation of something good enough to attract sufficient audiences, and that if an artform is unable to sustain itself without public funding, it should be allowed to die out Darwinian-style. Far as I am from adopting the view that we should artificially maintain culture in order to allow ‘unappreciated greatness’ to mature, it does seem perverse to not even allow the development of a particular genre, enabling it to get to the stage where it can be allowed to face the commercial gauntlet on its own two feet. Projects of development and new writing in similar art-forms such as straight drama are much more likely to receive funding; the natural inclination to invest in ‘research’ seems much more prevalent.

Lack of innovation in musical theatre leads to the real danger of lack of variety in the performance and production of this genre as a whole, and that includes opera as well. Raymond Gubbay’s Savoy Opera initiative will probably provide an excellent venue and opportunity for many people who might be wary of the traditions and connotations (false as they may be) of the Royal Opera House, thus creating a valuable new potential audience for opera and music theatre. However, as Gubbay’s intention is to stage works mainly from the canon of already known, respected and loved operas (Puccini, Verdi etc), it still does not address the lack of emerging variety.

To further address this worry, an operatic setting of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, has been rejected by every major opera company in England, despite support from Trevor Nunn and Sir Simon Rattle among others. As a production which could not only successfully cross the art/popular divide but appeal to such a varied age-group, it seems odd that it is facing such difficulty in finding a willing producer. It is just one more example among many of the reluctance of theatres and production companies to stick their necks out and let artistic risk and experimentation outweigh commercial consideration.

While Time Out may continue to proclaim a wealth of musical theatre and opera may be on stage every night in London in a range of venues and on a range of budgets, a range of material is not so simple to find. If opera and musical theatre are dying artforms, it is only because audiences will inevitably grow bored of being served the same shows in the same format time and again. Innovation and development are indeed the hard and stony path, but one which must be followed for the sake of giving opera and musical theatre a viable place in the cultural and artistic future.

Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris was at the Landor Theatre
and Passion was at the Bridewell Theatre.

Thanks to Tim Sawers, executive director of the Bridewell Theatre

The Young British Artists may not be stuck in the past, but they are evidently stuck in a rut. Their cerebral irony has become conceptually tedious. Even their once-famous parties are rather poorly attended affairs these days. On the other hand, their incessant critics – the Stuckist art group – also seem to be stuck with their hidebound views on what must and must not be painted. Into this vacuum, a plethora of new artists are emerging who are trying to take contemporary British art in a fresh direction altogether.

Squares on Papyrus

Rachel Jordan is one artist out to discover new aesthetic forms. She is a typical Essex girl – not. Born in Maldon in the revolutionary year of 1968, Rachel studied modern languages at Sheffield University, Perpignan and Barcelona, and then began studying art at Holborn’s City Lit Institute in 1993. Her student show was held at Bermondsey’s Tannery Gallery in 1998, where she exhibited her Warhol-derived ‘Princess’ series of photos paintings. In my opinion her best piece there was ‘Private Diana’, a shot of the Queen of Hearts straddling a road sign marked ‘private’ (it was in the year after her death). But Rachel was also painting expressive works at that time, like the landscape ‘Sea, Earth, Sun, Space Travel, Planets, Movement’, and the cityscapes ‘St Pancras Station’ and ‘Battersea Power Station’. In 2000 she encountered the Stuckist art group and moved to Medway soon after with her new partner Wolf Howard, one of the group’s founder members, and with whom Rachel is jointly exhibiting at Sittingbourne.

Currently Rachel is developing a curvaceous version of geometrical art. Conflating lines with coils goes back at least as far as William Hogarth, the 18th century London artist who used his rococo-inspired serpentine line to offset the straight-laced neo-classical motif of his time. Jordan’s own influence is the maverick Bauhaus artist Paul Klee, though she refuses to be tied down to old art categories like modernism. She was stimulated by the Roman mosaics she found in Tunis, which Klee had visited just before the First World War. In addition she has been inspired by the Islamic tiles adorning the walls of Granada’s Alhambra palace, and - closer to home - the Victorian tiles embedded in the floor of Rochester Cathedral. Utilising such diverse sources, Rachel’s work on display at Sittingbourne reflects the astonishing versatility of geometric art, in particular in her experiments with different materials and colours.

Painting patterns of geometric art ‘comes naturally’ to her, Rachel told me. Geometric structures can sometimes be interpreted as taking art in a conservative, restraining, limited direction, thereby setting boundaries on inspiration. For Rachel, though, her geometric art expresses her continuing wildness:

‘I think I still have a lot of expression coming through because I use water colours, and that can be very variable in how strong or weak the colour is on the paper. I don’t try to keep the colour that consistent when I apply it. Also, I don’t use a ruler. So, if I’m doing a hexagon I don’t try to make it a totally perfect mathematical hexagon. I’m just drawing by hand, so I still regard my paintings as full and free expression. What is also unlimited is the amount and combination of colours and forms that you can have.’

Blue Circles

Rachel does still opportunistically cooperate with the Stuckists. Indeed some of her work is being shown at Liverpool’s prestigious Walker Gallery this September, when the ‘Stuckist Punk Victorian’ exhibition opens there. But she is too open-minded to be constrained by their view of what constitutes art. For example, she told me that her current work cannot be admitted into Stuckist shows because it is too abstract. ‘They believe purely in figurative painting, since they feel that expresses the most truth about the human condition. I’ve been told by a couple of Stuckist artists that, if I’m painting patterns, then I’m probably avoiding an issue that I need to deal with through my painting’.

Actually, Rachel sees herself as more Stuckist than the Stuckists since she believes in painting – ‘It’s a vital and artistic way of expressing things’ – but she feels that they should also allow abstract painters to be part of their group. Nevertheless, she admits that she has had bad experiences in the past with various ideological groupings. She ends up distancing herself from them, not because she is deliberately contrary-minded, but more because ‘I’m on a path. And I don’t know where it is leading’:

‘Whatever I align myself with at the time, I always totally believe in. But I’m not going to stay stuck for ever. I think I’ve had my moment with being with the Stuckists. It’s carried me into a relationship. It’s almost served its purpose, but I don’t think that’s where my future lies. I think it lies with just me creating more work like this, with patterns, and then I’ll probably find some other people that I get closer with artistically.’

For Rachel’s future, all options remain open. Stuckism’s emphasis on expressively reacting to objective, especially figurative, reality is a constraint on her artistic ambition, which is seeking to generate painterly creativity from out of her subjectivity, from her imagination, at the moment. In travelling in this direction, Jordan demonstrates an explicit eagerness to move beyond the inert conflict between the conceptual YBA and the painterly Stuckists, and strike out in a wholly new aesthetic direction.

Rachel and Wolf’s Show is at the ISP Gallery, Church Street, Sittingbourne, to 26 March.

This pamphlet is basically an advert for New Labour’s proposed changes to funding higher education, in particular its case for universities charging students fees for courses.

Things will get much better, Schwartz argues, if instead of being funded by the state, through the complicated and unwieldy system that now exists, universities become subject to the laws of ‘supply and demand’. Universities could then act flexibly and in a responsive way, in regard to the kinds of courses they offer, how big they are and so on, in order to meet the demand from students. The ideal system, Schwartz argues, is one where ‘universities teach what they wish to as many students as they wish and…charge students what they wish’ (p9).

The writing style used to make this case is quite polemical; Schwartz sets himself up as a champion of freedom for universities against the ‘dead hand’ of the state. He presents himself (and therefore New Labour) as on a mission to ‘reclaim our universities’ from the burden of bureaucracy and the inefficiency it creates (at one point, he compares the current system to that of Stalinist Russia). And herein lies the huge irony at the centre of Schwartz’s argument. He apparently advocates greater freedom from the state, yet argues for an approach that in fact is based on, and will lead to, a far greater degree of state intervention in defining the purpose of, an shaping the work of universities than ever before.

Schwartz is no opponent of state control of higher education. Far from it, he is one of the key advocates of a model of higher education in which, while not financially dependent on the state, the university is more and more subject to the government’s political agenda, and is expected to achieve certain social objectives.

Underlying the case made by Schwartz (and the government) for changing the way HE funding works is the case for making higher education more ‘accessible’, ‘open’, and ‘democratic’ - as any observer of New Labour education policy will be very aware. The reason why funding has to change is in order to sustain the vision of HE that New Labour wants. This is one where 50 per cent of school leavers go to university.

Behind this move is a developed policy agenda, in which the university is deemed ‘relevant’ to society only if it does certain things. There is an essentially a two-pronged agenda for the university: it has to supply the right kind of workforce, and it has to deal with the problem of ‘social exclusion’. Or as Schwartz puts it, the university matters because graduates equal ‘a competitive economy’, and graduates equal ‘social justice’.

The effects of these policies are in fact already very clear. Through this instrumental use of the university to achieve these goals, the ‘relevance’ that the university could potentially really have for society is degraded. The notion that it is good to develop knowledge and search for the truth, make judgements, and value hard work and pressure - a notion that should be central the university - is diminished.

School leavers are increasingly herded into universities, put under less pressure to learn and study, and instead given ‘transferable skills’. Those from ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds are more and more subject to ‘special treatment’ (this could also be called being patronised). The purpose of education as involving the development of ideas and the search for the truth is being replaced with the idea that its aim is to make people feel good about themselves, develop their self-esteem, and thus be ‘socially included’.

The state certainly is acting as a dead hand on universities in this way; through the politicisation of what the function of teaching and research is, and through pushing a philistine and narrow-minded idea about what relevance the university has. This is the flipside of the case for fees and changing funding. It is a pity these problems, rather than fees, have so far created so little debate.

Charlton and Andras argue that the ‘modernisation’ process is both inevitable and desirable. Basing their analysis on systems theory, they put forward a functionalist approach to cultural evolution. In this thesis, economics, politics, law, education, the mass media etc are described as ‘interdependent modular social systems’, each constituted by the communication of information. Society moves by a ‘trial and error’ process towards greater complexity and efficiency, the core values of modernisation.

‘The history of life on earth’ entails a progression from pure environment to simple to complex systems. This linear, evolutionist take on history and the formation of superior societies, where life quality is better and individuals are happier, involves a rational scientific epistemology, with the risk of ethnocentrism closely at hand.

Though the authors point out that there is no single, ‘true’ function of a social system - instead each has multiple functions which differ according to viewpoint, time and location - determinism is implicit in the way social systems are to be defined and delineated. As the authors themselves put it, ‘systems theory entails making decisions to define some clusters of communications as being systems…..’ (p.69).

The term ‘operational closure’ indicates a point at which systems form and can be treated as autonomous from their surroundings. The extent to which the operational closure is in fact a ‘problematic closure’, in a Derridian sense, can of course be further discussed. This term refers to the proposition that any given category or object of analysis must have always already been constituted or differentiated prior to the project of its analysis or investigation. In other words, delineating a subject matter (here, a system) or presupposing its existence, actually creates it. (See Derrida’s Aporias, 1993.)

The authors claim that systems modelling can be tested, and they outline some criteria for defining the boundaries of systems, including ratios of internal and external communications, where the higher the density of intra-system communication in relation to inter-system communication, the more complex the system is. However, they also bring up the necessary acknowledgment that the theorist, being limited by practical and subjective constraints, has an effect on his or her observation and sampling procedures. (This influence of the theorist on his/her study or subject-matter, is these days taken for granted rather than being a radical proposition.)

The authors argue that systems cannot be compared and evaluated on the basis of rational analysis alone. Although they agree with Weber’s contention that modern social systems tend to become more rational in their organisation, rational analysis is best for intra-system decisions, whereas the proper method for distinguishing systems and deciding between them is comparative.

Relations between systems are emergent and arise through selection. In other words, the organisation of a modern system takes shape through a ‘trial and error’ process. Hence, the authors also argue against any overarching control of social systems, whether through an analytical and strategic device such as rationality, a ruling class or a political power centre, such as Marxism, which the authors describe as an anti-modernisation ideology since it entails long-term domination of social systems by the political system. These modes of analysis or rule are said to stifle democracy and pluralism.

The definitions of the boundaries of any given system are highly problematic, although not rendered problematic enough by Charlton and Andras. Systems theory does not allow for sufficient consideration of the openness of social and cultural institutions and practices. It also involves the idea of equilibrium as an outcome of the evolutionary advancement through stages of modernisation. Along the way, as the authors argue, certain pressures from the natural environment as well as from other social systems affect the selection process of any given system, so interdependencies, as well as competition, will increase over time. However, various short-term problems or costs that may arise are taken as acceptable detrimental effects in view of possible long-term gains. One effect of selection is a belief in progress: modernising society operates on the basis of optimism about the unknown future.

The interlinking and interdependency of social systems can for example be explained by the fact that the function of a given system differs depending on the viewpoint of the social system from within which it is evaluated. For instance, education, from within the educational system itself, implies continually raising the average level of ‘generic cognitive skills in the population’ (p.26) and from the viewpoint of economics, it is desirable and necessary for the expansion of skilled manpower. From a political viewpoint, everyone may benefit from an expansion of formal education as it leads individuals to higher status jobs, health and happiness and also to increased complexity of information-processing in the general workforce. It may also extend liberal values such as racial tolerance, and a common educational system also facilitates a process of social unification and hence is a basis for national culture.

Systems in themselves do not take a holistic approach to human agency. Instead agency is defined in ‘modular system-specific terms’, as operating differently according to the system within which the individual is defined and acts. Hence, within politics, the population is comprised of ‘voters’ and within the health system of (potential) ‘patients’ and so on. These partial, fractional takes on human agency involve a denial of an overarching, all-inclusive social system.

In other words, the authors argue against what they see as a common misunderstanding of contemporary society in Western democracies, namely the view that the power structures within it have a pyramidal shape dominated by either government or capitalist economics. The authors prefer the term ‘mosaic’ to describe the structure of pluralistic modernising societies.

This idea may in some ways be likened to Foucault’s notion of power as functioning ‘in the form of a chain’, rather than as an oppressive unidirectional force or intrusion. In his view, individuals are always in the position of both exercising and being subjected to power. Power relations permeate all levels of social existence and operate at every site of social life and so Foucault directs attention towards the ‘microphysics of power’.

What is the role and place of the individual amongst these multiple modular social systems? A separation between individuals and systems seems to fit accurately into Charlton’s and Andras’ vision of society. The authors do not attempt to conflate some of the most deep rooted dichotomies of Western cultures, but instead deploy them to demonstrate the validity of their theory. They rename the individual and society dualism as ‘individual versus several modular systems’. They distinguish between the ‘objective reality of social systems’ and the ‘emotional subjectivity of the individual’, and assert that whilst society operates ‘on the basis of abstract processes’, individuals ‘experience the world as biological animals’. They also contrast the ‘modular, specialised “social self”’ with the ‘integrated “subjective self”’.

These descriptions of the relations between individual and society are outlined in chapter four, ‘Opposition to Modernization’, where the authors write that the most powerful critique against modernisation is spiritual. Modernisation leads to an increasing loss of meaning as individuals become more and more alienated in merely serving the needs of the system. The authors go on to say that ‘this form of primary alienation is expressed in all manner of dichotomies - the private versus public, heart versus mind, art versus science, naïve versus sentimental, Dionysus versus Apollo and so on.’ (56)

What then of the future of the individual within such prospects of alienation and subordination to the needs and demands of systems? Charlton and Andras believe that there are forces within modernisation that counteract this subordination and compel the system to acknowledge human wants and needs. The system’s need for a skilled workforce for instance, empowers the educated to demand certain working conditions.

In modernising society, interactions between producers and consumers in the marketplace allow people to ‘mix and match’ in order to fulfil their needs and reach their desired psychological states. The New Age movement for instance is described as endorsing such a pick n’ mix mentality and strategy of fulfilment. It is well adapted to the modernising society as it allows for eclecticism and also for tolerance and acceptance of others’ spiritualities and truths alongside one’s own aspirations of self fulfilment.

If the individual, from the viewpoint of various social systems, is conceived of as partial and partially fulfilled, for instance education develops cognitive aptitudes, the health system improves physical wellbeing and so on, then the individual must take on this pick ‘n’ mix mentality as well. In this sense modernisation requires people to reformulate themselves as adaptive, and to ‘change their nature just enough to remove their feelings of alienation and restore the sense of belonging in the world’ (62, italics in original). This can even, if necessary, involve genetic modification of humans to ‘remove the mismatch between our Stone Age minds and the Silicon Age culture’ (61).

Accordingly, the individual must approach university as a route to advance his/her chances in the labour market, work as an economic activity, home as an outlet for affection, a place of worship for spiritual fulfilment and so on. This compartmentalisation of society gives directives of what to do when and where and hence Charlton’s and Andras’ thesis is itself a prescriptive method of analysis which provides instructions not on whether to ‘modernise’, but how.