He had bought a small plot of ground a few miles from where they lived and he had just erected on it two glass-houses in which he proposed to cultivate tomatoes for profit. He had come back one evening and asked her if she’d ever noticed tomatoes in the shops. ‘A full chip when you go by in the morning,’ he’d said, ‘and an empty one when you come home at night.’ The plot of land had been paid for out of capital left to her by her father, as had the shed he had built in the garden and the concreting in the yard. Earlier in her marriage to Mr Gregan she had once or twice protested at his way of appropriating her money, but he had pointed out that it was essential to invest money in a sensible manner rather than to purchase clothes with it, or household luxuries that would wear out quickly. He had a way of speaking about such matters over a period of several weeks, making his point after tea every evening when they sat down by the fire. ‘A garment can let you down,’ he would say. ‘A fur coat taken off the back of some misfortunate animal could be eaten by our friend Master Moth and then where’d you be? Or you’d have it stolen off your arm by some brigand when you were out walking in the Botanic Gardens. You’d be paying out good money on insurance with an expensive garment, whereas a concreted yard requires no insurance whatsoever. Once it’s down it’s in place for ever. A concreted yard is an improvement to any property.’ He would go on until it was time for the News and when the News was over he would continue. She might ask him if he’d mind not sitting by the fire in his socks in case anyone came to the door, but he usually didn’t hear when she referred to his personal habits. He never appeared to notice her anger, or her sarcasm. He went his way, but somehow she found it difficult to go hers.

O’Neil’s Hotel in Dublin has seen better days. Now there is still O’Shea, the hall porter, attended by his faithful greyhound, but he is the only remaining member of staff. The hotel’s ninety-one year old owner, Mrs Sinnott lives in an upper room, sitting by the window year after year in absolute silence. An assortment of part-time prostitutes, their pimp and various relatives and neighbours use the place for one purpose or another, each of them big on self-deception and hopelessness, but there are never any real guests.

The hotel is a closed community, a fictional window on the world, and William Trevor shows us enough of its inhabitants for us to want more, and we are privy to their failings as well as their victories, their vulnerabilities as well as their strengths.

By chance, Mrs Eckdorf, a twice divorced middle-aged woman, a photographer of sorts, hears of O’Neill’s and decides to visit. We then become witnesses as Mrs Eckdorf’s own personality disintegrates and she simultaneously internalizes and fictionalizes the inhabitants of the hotel.

This novel is a bleak statement on the human condition, concerned as it is with an alienating and alienated society. I was reminded on more than one occasion of the work of William Faulkner, and particularly of Joyce’s Dubliners.

William Trevor is a rare and skillful writer. He manages to leave you with the impression that you’ve seen and come to know, not only Dublin, or the whole of Ireland, but that you’ve met and seen the workings of humanity itself.

I’ve made a great discovery. . . and I’ll tell you what it is: the strongest person in the world is the one who stands alone
Dr. Tomas Stockmann.

Henrik Ibsen’s opening play at the newly refurbished Sheffield Crucible, is An Enemy of the People, with Anthony Sher in the role of Dr Stockmann.

It’s a disturbing drama, constituting an attack on democracy and the theory of majority rule, a position with which Ibsen himself had some sympathy.

Stockman, a scientist and an idealist, quite unworldly in this production, almost a natural innocent, discovers that the waters of his Spa town are polluted and poisonous. He immediately wants to go public with this news, shut the Spa down and, at whatever expense, cleanse and reroute the water. But his brother, the Mayor, suppresses the report. The bureaucrats, the local small businessmen’s association, the town newspaper and eventually the workers of the town, turn on Stockman, his family and his friends, and reduce them to penury.

The play works as a forum for ideas. For a modern audience to empathize with Stockmann entirely is almost impossible. He does, of course, stand for truth against the suppression and lies of his brother and the other organs of the democratic process, but he does not understand the need to educate his audience and become instead self-righteous and arrogant and a chilling and contemptuous social darwinist in his remarks about “disgusting, mangy, vulgar mongrels” whose brains don’t develop in the same manner as gently reared pedigree dogs.

On the other hand his sense that truth, any truth, has a limited lifetime, and that time always brings us round to the realisation that what was once true has now become untrue, is never less than fascinating.

And his fear that the suppression of material facts and the acceptance of political lies will lead, inevitably, to a kind of spiritual corruption and decay of society, is a companion to each of us in the twenty-first century.

A disturbing play, then; one that still, in our own time, offers an audience no place to hide.

This production, directed by Daniel Evans, with Antony Sher as Dr Stockmann, in a new version by Christopher Hampton, runs until the 20th March.

If you go out and fight for freedom you should never do so in your best trousers.
Dr. Tomas Stockmann.

He woke up soaked with sweat, breathing stale and fetid air. A naked light bulb shone in his eyes and he found he was in a steel-framed bunk slung by chains from the wall, like a bunk in a troopship or a jail.

“. . . Everybody out,” a voice called, and there were other sounds: groans and curses, wretched coughing and hawking, a loud fart, the creak and bang of bunks being folded back and clamped against the wall. “Let’s go, let’s go. Everybody out.”

When he sat up a hand closed around his shoulder and rolled him onto the floor. He was wearing grey cotton pajamas that were much too big for him: the pants tripped his stumbling bare feet and the sleeves hung to his fingertips. Swaying and squinting under the lights, he rolled up the sleeves first, disclosing a loose plastic bracelet that read Wilder John C. He bent over to roll up the pants but was kicked from behind and fell to his hands, and he looked up frightened into the angry face of a Negro in pajamas like his own.

“Watch your ass, man. This here’s the corridor. You got no business hunkerin’ down playin’ with yourself; get up and walk.”

And he did. Steel-mesh panels were being drawn across the folded bunks to prevent anyone from using them: this was indeed the corridor, the place for walking. It was yellow and green and brown and black; it was neither very long nor very wide, but it was immensely crowded with men of all ages from adolescence to senility, whites and Negroes and Puerto Ricans, half of them walking one way and half in the other, the dismaying variety of their faces moving into the glare of lights and then into shadows and then into the lights again. Some were talking one another and some talked to themselves, but most were silent. He felt warm grit under his feet until he stepped on something slick; then he saw that the black floor ahead was scattered with gobs of phlegm. A few of the walking men wore dirty paper slippers, and he envied them; a few were smoking, with packs of cigarettes in their pajama-top pockets, which puckered the roof of his mouth. Then he saw that some weren’t wearing pajama tops but straightjackets, and he wanted to whimper like a child.

There were closed windows at both ends of the corridor, covered with steel mesh: the light outside was drab – either an early grey morning or a late grey afternoon – and there was nothing to see but air shafts and windowless walls.

Near the middle of the corridor stood a Negro orderly in hospital greens, and he hurried toward him with a mouthful of questions – Look: where’s my clothes? Where’s my money? Where’s a phone: What’s the deal here? – but when he confronted the man he felt small and shy and all he knew was that his bladder was about to burst.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“Over there.”

And he followed the pointed finger into a bright stinking latrine where men squatted on toilet bowls or stood jockeying for position at a long urinal trough.

John Wilder is going on forty with a successful career in sales and a stable family; and he’s increasingly irrational, paranoid, and monstrously self-obsessed.

Yates, who is remembered for writing about the mundane sadness of domestic life in a flat emotionless prose, tackles new territory here, and the result is probably the weakest of his novels.

The novel is disappointing but not without its peaks, and Yates reminds us from time to time that he speaks “for weakness, for neurasthenic darkness, for struggle without hope and for the self-defeating passions of ignorance.”

He concentrates on alcoholism and insanity in this unrelentingly realist novel, but I could only empathize with the main character in flashes and was left wondering if the story would have been better narrated through the eyes of John Wilder’s wife. Yates gives her the first and last chapters, but she has little to do with the main part of the narrative, which leaves us trapped in the disintegrating mind of her husband.

1st March 1998
The other night at dinner, Sheba talked about the first time that she and the Connolly boy kissed. I had heard most of it before, of course, there being few aspects of the Connolly business that Sheba has not described to me several times over. But this time round, something new came up. I happened to ask her if anything about the first embrace had surprised her. She laughed. Yes, the smell of the whole thing had been surprising, she said. She hadn’t anticipated his personal odour and if she had, she would probably have guessed at something teenagey: bubble gum, cola, feet.

When the moment arrived, what I actually inhaled was soap, tumble-dried laundry. He smelled of scrupulous self-maintenance. You know the washing machine fug that envelopes you sometimes, walking past the basement vents of mansion flats? Like that. So clean, Barbara. Never any of that cheese and onion breath that the other kids have.

Sheba, married and with children of her own, is obsessed with a young boy, one of her pupils. Barbara, a teacher at the same school, is single and lonely. Zoë Heller brings them together in this rather compelling novel of middle-class angst and personal insight. Two women who, each in her own way, are in deep denial and seem incapable of facing the truth of their lives.

As the novel progresses, the initial narrative of middle-aged femme fatale and grubby fifteen-year-old schoolboy is eclipsed by the realization that Barbara, our seemingly disinterested narrator, is in fact a predator herself, probably of a more dangerous hue than her colleague.

I enjoyed the novel and certainly found it compelling. But the writing is uneven, often transparent in quality, it occasionally disintegrates into a kind of self-conscious journalese. Nevertheless, the underlying power of the theme is maintained, and I find myself musing on these characters long after finishing the book.

It reads like this:

In the fifth class I talked about Wages, Price and Profits and discussed the (Communist) Manifesto again. After an hour General Mendoza was sleeping soundly. Don’t worry said General Pinochet, come with me. I followed him to a large window, which looked out over the gardens behind the house. A full moon illuminated the smooth surface of a swimming pool. He opened the window. Behind us I could hear the muffled voices of the generals talking about Marta Harnecker. A delicious perfume given off by clumps of flowers was wafting all through the gardens. A bird called out and straight away, from somewhere within the walls or from an adjoining property, a bird of the same species replied, then I heard a flapping of wings that seemed to rip through the night and then the deep silence returned, unscathed. Let’s take a walk, said the general. As if he were a magician, as soon as we stepped through the window-frame and entered the enchanted gardens, lights came on, exquisitely scattered here and there among the plants. Then I talked about The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which Engels wrote on his own, and the General nodded at each stage of my explanation, now and then asking a pertinent question, and from time to time both of us fell silent and looked at the moon sailing on alone through infinite space. Perhaps it was that vision that gave me the nerve to ask him if he knew Leopardi. He said he didn’t. He asked who Leopardi was. We stopped for a moment. Standing at the window, the other generals were looking out into the night. A nineteenth-century Italian poet, I said. If I may be so bold, sir, I said, this moon reminds me of two of his poems. “The Infinite” and “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd of Asia”. General Pinochet did not express the slightest interest. Walking beside him I recited what I knew by heart of “The Infinite”. Nice poetry, he said.

Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix is a Catholic priest, a failed poet, a literary critic, and a member of Opus Dei. On his deathbed he attempts to justify his own complacency, condemning himself by failing to convince us of the goodness in his life. We perceive him as a quintessentially modern villain, one who is marked out by his silence in the face of evil.

There are wonderful images produced throughout the novel; our hapless priest involves himself in a programme to save the decaying churches of Europe from pigeon shit by the use of birds of prey, where it seems almost every parish priest harbours his own falcon. Pablo Neruda addresses the moon with his poetry. And in the final section of the book a literary soirée is held in the upper rooms of a house while a working torture chamber takes apart political prisoners in the cellar.

In this short novel Bolaño brings together church, state, and literature in a magical and extraordinary way. He is an astonishing writer.

The next case was a young man arrested for grievous bodily harm. He pleaded guilty. A policeman told the court that he had struck his wife in the face with a glass while under the influence of drink. Desmond entered a plea for leniency. He spoke in low tones so that Gordon had to strain to hear what he was saying. He said that the young man had been motivated by jealous rage, that the young woman had indulged in relations with another man. He called it an occasion of adultery. He did not wish to condone the young man’s behaviour but he had now forsworn alcohol and was involved in part-time duties with a Christian organization.

Gordon could see the man’s wife sitting in front of him in the public gallery. She was small and blonde. There was a vivid scar across her cheekbone and nose and she lifted her hand often to touch it. Her husband didn’t look at her. Desmond said that she had allowed herself to be seduced by an older man, a manager at her place of work. He said that her husband, an assistant in a hardware shop, had seen them together in a bar on Amelia Street. The small blonde woman looked at the ground as Desmond went back over the details of her affair as though she knew herself on trial on grounds of betrayal and subversion of a plain man’s yearning heart.

When the judge passed down a sentence of one year’s penal servitude suspended for two years, the woman rose and quit the court without lifting her head, although Gordon saw her lips move as she passed him. He thought she was counting, as though disgrace was a thing to be tallied and made account of, or that she had henceforth been pledged to a recital of the lonely offices of the unfaithful wife.

The novel is based around actual events: On a wet and misty night in November 1952 the body of Patricia Curran was discovered in the grounds of her family home near Belfast. The 19-year-old had been stabbed 37 times.

The murder of the judge’s daughter led to a major miscarriage of justice that saw an innocent man “fitted up”, as the establishment closed ranks and covered up the killing. The victim of this conspiracy was Iain Hay Gordon, a 20-year-old Scotsman who was serving his National Service with the RAF in Northern Ireland.

In the year 2000 Mr Gordon finally managed to clear his name.

It emerged that he was coerced into signing a false confession, was wrongly ruled insane, and that there were serious faults in the police investigation. In fact, Gordon was completely innocent and was the subject of a genuine miscarriage of justice.

Eoin McNamee’s fictional representation of these events concentrates on human weakness, guilt, innocence and mischief, and he delivers a consummate and beautifully written tale.

McNamee is interested in corruption – people who have been corrupted; and he is interested in death; but his over-riding obsession seems to be the atmosphere in which both of these strands are played out. He is an artist who feels that his task is to find and deepen a mystery rather than explain it; he looks for and discovers a kind of truth, but that is not revealed to us in the form of an answer.

Finally, The Blue Tango is a masterclass in observational prose.

The city center was old, with three- or four-story buildings and arcaded plazas in a state of neglect and young office workers in shirt-sleeves and Indian women with bundles on their backs hurrying down cobblestoned streets, and they saw streetwalkers and young thugs loitering on the corners. Mexican types straight out of a black-and-white movie. Toward the east were the middle- and upper-class neighbourhoods. There they saw streets with carefully pruned trees and public playgrounds and shopping centers. The university was there, too. To the north were abandoned factories and sheds and a street of bars and souvenir shops and small hotels, where it was said no one ever slept, and further out there were more poor neighbourhoods, though they were less crowded, and vacant lots out of which every so often there rose a school. To the south they discovered rail lines and slum soccer fields surrounded by shacks, and they even watched a match, without getting out of the car, between a team of the terminally ill and a team of starving to death, and there were two highways that led out of the city, and a gully that had become a garbage dump, and neighbourhoods that had grown up lame or mutilated or blind, and sometimes, in the distance, the sillhouettes of industrial warehouses, the horizon of the maquiladoras.

The city, like all cities, was endless. If you continued east, say, there came a moment when the middle-class neighbourhoods ended and the slums began, like a reflection of what happened in the west but jumbled up, with a rougher orography: hills, valleys, the remains of old ranches, dry riverbeds, all of which went some way toward preventing overcrowding. To the north they saw a fence that separated the United States from Mexico and they gazed past it at the Arizona desert, this time getting out of the car. In the west they circled a couple of industrial parks that were in their turn being surrounded by slums.

They were convinced the city was growing by the second. On the far edge of Santa Teresa, they saw flocks of black vultures, watchful, walking through barren fields, birds that here were called turkey vultures, and also turkey buzzards. Where there were vultures, they noted, there were no other birds. They drank tequila and beer and ate tacos at a motel on the Santa Teresa-Caborca highway, at outdoor tables with a view. The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.

This is a remarkable book by any standards, and I’m so glad I wasn’t put off by its 900 pages, and took the time to read it.

Bolaño actually presents us with five separate novels and, with the exception of the last one, they can all be read without reference to the others.

2666 opens with a novel about four European literary critics, academics, who specialize in the work of a fictional German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi. Archimboldi, rumoured to be a future recipient of the Nobel Prize, is an evasive and reclusive writer who stays well away from the public eye. In fact, none of the critics who pursue him in this novel manage to track him down in person, though they seek him in several different countries, even traveling to a boom town in Mexico in their quest.

Bolaño’s subjects are writers and violence, and staying in the border town of Santa Teresa, we are introduced to Amalfitano, a professor of philosophy and literature at the local university. This text is quite different to the opening novel of the quintet, with an overt feeling of magical realism about it; Amalfitano leaves a book of geometry hanging on a clothesline in his back yard, and we slowly become aware that he is slipping into insanity. We also learn something about Amalfitano’s first wife, who ran off after a mad Spanish poet.

The third part of 2666 is entitled, The Part About Fate, and follows an American reporter, Oscar Fate, who is sent to cover a boxing match in Santa Teresa. There have been clues in the two preceding books, but in this one we are very aware that there are lots of cases of sexually-violated and murdered young women, their bodies found regularly in deserted parking lots, isolated ravines, abandoned buildings and the surrounding desert. The narrative throughout is that of hardboiled noir.

The Part About the Crimes, the fourth part of 2666, is a tour-de-force, one inexhaustible list of the hundreds of women and girls who are butchered in and around Santa Teresa. One of the characters in this section introduces us to the concept of gynophobia, which is fear of women. Bolaño describes the discovery of each body in forensic, even clinical terms, in some cases drifting over to the more hard-edged tone of the crime-novelist. As the body-count builds, and with no solution or hint of closure in sight, we begin to glimpse the extent of the deep misogyny which pervades our society and culture. Though a handful of these horrific crimes are ’solved’, most are shelved with little or no investigation taking place.

The final section, The Part About Archimboldi, ties everything together. We finally meet the German writer, follow him through his childhood and his time as a soldier in the second world war, witness the surrealistic horror of the twentieth century through his eyes as well as taking in his relationship to beauty and solitude. And we finally understand how all the other sections of 2666 relate to each other.

It is, of course, impossible to describe this novel; to understand it and what it is about there is no substitute for reading the book. So much of its greatness is in the language and in the bravado of the telling. Bolaño is a poet and his prose is always drifting, like the smoke from a cigarette; it weaves patterns in your mind and carries on working in the same way whether the book is in your hand or not. I believe it is going to stay with me for a long, long time.

Roberto Bolaño was born 28 April 1953 in Santiago, Chile and he died 15 July 2003 in Blanes, Spain. 2666 was his final statement.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a production of the play, and I certainly came to Newcastle with some expectations for the language and power that Shakespeare added to the brew.

As Caesar’s legend and popularity look set to take him to the throne, his inner cabinet and friends conspire to prevent what they fear will become a dictatorship. His assassination, however, unleashes civil strife and a bloody and relentless war.

In order to give the audience some idea of the mob and the people of Rome, much use is made of video projections onto a series of screens, together with cheers and jeers and various other city-like sounds. Although this is very professionally done, it never seems to work, proving to be more of a distraction from the main action of the play, and therefore undermining it more than adding to its effectiveness.

Sam Troughton as Brutus turns in a troubled performance of the philosopher statesman transforming himself into a soldier, not helped at all by a wardrobe that verges at times on the brink of gender ambiguity.

Darrell D’Silva is an interesting and slightly overweight Mark Antony who comes close to overplaying his main speech, as though he doesn’t really believe the inner power of the text.

John MacKay is impressive as Cassius, tall and thin and needy and, quite surprisingly, he drew more sympathy from me than Brutus.

Greg Hicks, is an arrogant Caesar. Perhaps too young and lacking in gravitas, but believable nevertheless, and bringing some humour into the proceedings.

For me, Hannah Young’s performance as Portia, especially in her scene with Brutus, was the most moving and memorable of the evening.

This was not a great production and ultimately disappointing. It gives a taste of the play’s possibilities without really delivering. Julius Caesar returns to Stratford-upon-Avon in Summer 2010 for a limited number of performances.