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.

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.

I think it was another church using it this morning, well-to-do white-haired ladies trying to guess the going-rate for used lamp-shades, partial jigsaw puzzles and books about rambling along the seashore.

They’d set up tables and chairs in the yard and the sun shone down on it all and there was a small crowd around the brick-a-brack and many of the tables were occupied by middle-aged couples with tea and sultana scones. You could easily have believed there was a god. Some of them obviously did.

I got a coffee and found myself a table next to three guys who looked like they’d been sleeping rough. They’d finished their coffee or tea but didn’t look at all ready to move. The sun must’ve felt particularly good if you’d spent the night on the stones.

‘Aw, fuck,’ the biggest one said to the other two. ‘I’ve got to have it.’ He had a red, boozer’s face, was unshaven and he carried with him an impossible-to-control tremor in his hands, arms, shoulders and neck.

‘You’ll have to be quick,’ said the one with his back to me. White hair and better dressed than the others. Cleaner, too. ‘Things like that, they’re snapped up quick; tourists, dealers. Everybody’ll be after it. What’re they asking?’

‘Thirty pence, but she might take less.’

‘You don’t need it,’ said the third one. He never completely closed his mouth, and he was overweight with a belly like the latter stages of pregnancy. He wore spectacles that favoured the right side of his face.

‘You don’t know what I need, Ron. That’s up to me. I know what I need.’

‘But it’s me you want to stump up the cash,’ Ron said. ‘Well, fuck you, I’m not gonna do it because I don’t believe you need such a thing, and that’s that.’

‘Aw, give him the money, Ron,’ said the one with his back to me. ‘We’ll never hear the end of it.’

‘You give him the money,’ Ron said. ‘I’m giving him nothing. He doesn’t need it.’

‘I can’t give him the money,’ said the one with his back to me. ‘I don’t have a penny piece left. If I had the money, I’d give it to him. But I don’t have it. You have it and you could give it to him if you wanted or if you was a fucking christian.’

‘Well, I’m not and I won’t, so the two of you can go fuck.’

The biggest one pushed himself away from the table and came over to me. ‘You got some change, mate.’

I dug a fifty pence piece out of my pocket and placed it in his hand.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You’re a gentleman.’ He glanced over at Ron and gave him an ironic smile.

He tottered over to the brick-a-brack stall and pushed his way to the front of the bargain-hunters. His feet were bad. When he walked south the toes of his right foot pointed west and the toes of his left foot pointed east.

‘He’s barmy,’ Ron said.

‘You’re barmy some days,’ said the one with his back to me.

When the biggest one returned he was clutching a tiny angel, cast in white resin. He seated himself back at the table and placed it in front of him. It was perhaps 8 centimetres tall. A boy angel with tiny wings and white curls and a long white nightgown, playing a child’s guitar. The new owner smiled down at it and upended a saucer, using it as a plinth for the figure.

‘Where you gonna put it,’ Ron asked. ‘You ain’t got anywhere.’

‘Yes, I have,’ said the big one indignantly. ‘I’ve got a bed; I’ve got a table, three chairs, and a settee.’

‘So where you gonna put it?’ asked the one with his back to me.

‘On the table,’ the big one said.

He lapsed into silence, his tremors momentarily healed, his smiling gaze on the angel, and as I waited for more the smile spread, first to Ron, and then to the one with his back to me. I couldn’t see his face, but it was obvious from the set of his head.

For a little while when Walter Henderson was nine years old he thought falling dead was the very zenith of romance, and so did a number of his friends. Having found that the only truly rewarding part of any cops-and-robbers game was the moment when you pretended to be shot, clutched your heart, dropped your pistol and crumpled to the earth, they soon dispensed with the rest of it – the tiresome business of choosing up sides and sneaking around – and refined the game to its essence. It became a matter of individual performance, almost an art. One of them at a time would run dramatically along the crest of a hill, and at a given point the ambush would occur: a simultaneous jerking of aimed toy pistols and a chorus of those staccato throaty sounds – a kind of hoarse-whispered “Pk-k-ew! Pk-k-ew!” with which little boys simulate the noise of gunfire. Then the performer would stop, turn, stand poised for a moment in graceful agony, pitch over and fall down the hill in a whirl of arms and legs and a splendid cloud of dust, and finally sprawl flat at the bottom, a rumpled corpse. When he got up and brushed off his clothes, the others would criticize his form (“Pretty good,” or “Too stiff,” or “Didn’t look natural”), and then it would be the next player’s turn. That was all there was to the game, but Walter Henderson loved it. He was a slight, poorly coordinated boy, and this was the only thing even faintly like a sport at which he excelled. Nobody could match the abandon with which he flung his limp body down the hill, and he revelled in the small acclaim it won him. Eventually the others grew bored with the game, after some older boys had laughed at them. Walter turned reluctantly to more wholesome forms of play, and soon he had forgotten about it. But he had occasion to remember it, vividly, one May afternoon nearly twenty-five years later in a Lexington Avenue office building, while he sat at his desk pretending to work and waiting to be fired.

Richard Yates never wrote anything as fine as Gatsby, but then again, he was more consistent than Scott-Fitzgerald, and in several of his novels and stories he came within a whisker of eclipsing America’s finest exponent of modernist fiction. His subject was always the American Dream and its casualties, the continuing inability of his twentieth century characters to truly live together.

Revolutionary Road is recognised as one of the greatest novels of urban America. The Easter Parade, which chronicles the lives of two sisters searching for happiness in different pockets of the ‘dream’ is always touching, subtle and poignant, brave and beautiful and true. In Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Yates gives us exactly that, eleven stories, each of them dealing with the loneliness of an individual. The self-destructive Vincent Sabella, who had spent most of his life in some kind of orphanage. Sergeant Reece, the tyrannical Tennessean soldier who insists on doing his job. And Bob Prentice, the mediocre writer who sees himself as Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott-Fitzgerald, but who in reality is not much good at anything. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness is not Dubliners, but each of the stories is a gem, giving us insight into the emptiness of our own lives and people close to us and those we love. Richard Yates spares us nothing. He is a brave and truthful writer and in order to stay with him as a reader, you have to be prepared for the worst.

1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.

5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.

6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.

8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.

9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

If you are a writer in the 21st century your main task is to break all these rules on a regular basis. Though you may find that someone got there before you.

‘You must take the word “reactionary” literally these days. A reactionary is a citizen who reacts when the age-long standards of the South are threatened. When States’ rights are trampled on by the Federal Government, then the Southern patriot is duty-bound to react. Otherwise the noble standards of the South will be betrayed.’

‘What noble standards?’ Jester asked.

‘Why boy, use your head. The noble standards of our way of life, the traditional institutions of the South.’

Jester did not say anything but his eyes were sceptical and the old Judge, sensitive to all his grandson’s reactions, noticed this.

‘The Federal Government is trying to question the legality of the Democratic Primary so that the whole balance of Southern civilization will be jeopardized.’

Jester asked, ‘How?’

‘Why, boy, I’m referring to segregation itself.’

‘Why are you always harping on segregation?’

‘Why, Jester, you’re joking.’

Jester was suddenly serious. ‘No, I’m not.’

The Judge was baffled. ‘The time may come in your generation – I hope I won’t be here – when the educational system itself is mixed – with no colour line. How would you like that?’

Jester did not answer.

‘How would you like to see a hulking Nigra boy sharing a desk with a delicate little white girl?’
The Judge could not believe in the possibility of this; he wanted to shock Jester to the gravity of the situation. His eyes challenged his grandson to react in the spirit of Southern gentlemen.

‘How about a hulking white girl sharing a desk with a delicate little Negro boy?’

‘What?’

Jester did not repeat his words, nor did the old Judge want to hear again the words that so alarmed him. It was as though his grandson had committed some act of incipient lunacy, and it is fearful to acknowledge the approach of madness in a beloved. It is so fearful that the old Judge preferred to distrust his own hearing, although the sound of Jester’s voice still throbbed against his eardrums. He tried to twist the words to his own reason.

‘You’re right, Lambones, whenever I read such communist ideas I realize how unthinkable the notions are. Certain things are just too preposterous to consider.’

The novel was first published in 1961 and, like McCullers’ previous work, is concerned with man’s spiritual isolation, his loneliness. But it is set in a small Georgian town at a time when the struggles of the civil rights movement were coming to fruition, and when the old south is stubornly refusing to believe that an ancient and cherished lifestyle is fated to end for ever.

Part of the narrative is seen through the eyes of JT Malone, a local pharmacist who is dying of leukemia. We watch him in denial of his disease, he changes doctors and refuses to face the reality, and eventually spends much of his time with the old Judge who tells him what he wants to hear. Meanwhile, the Judge has hired a young black man as his amanuensis, an engaging and intelligent youth, to help him fight the Federal government and gain reparations for the South.

McCullers, of course, is reminiscent of Faulkner, and her landscapes are drenched in memory and longing, but Clock Without Hands made me think more of Tennessee Williams in its depiction of how past traumatic and familial events often lead to grotesque results in seemingly normal citizens.

McCullers hand, however, seems to have less compassion than her contemporaries as she observes her characters’ inability to fully live their lives and an awareness of love which is riddled with flaws. Clock Without Hands is a thoughtful and poetic novel of race, class, and justice.

Oscar Humlum and I had been travelling companions for a long time before we met, though without knowing it.

There was nothing strange about this. It was perfectly normal. Because, for an orphan in Denmark, everything was very strictly regulated. Across the country ran certain tunnels that were invisible; they ran alongside each other, absolutely parallel. So, when Humlum and I met, we did not talk much about the past. This silence – it was so as not to pry, but also because we knew that, in a way, we had been travelling together, even though we had not seen one another.

First one was put into a Home for Infants. One was so small, there, that one could not remember anything, but the file stated that I had been in two different ones.

After that one was put in a children’s home. Both Humlum and I had been with the Christian Foundation. I was at the Home on Peter Bang’s Vej, between the KB playing fields and Flintholm Church. Humlum was in Esbjerg. One feels as though one ought to have remembered quite a bit about that time, but the only thing one remembered was the storytelling, and the punishment for soiling one’s mouth with swearwords – the matron, Sister Ragna, pushed one’s head down the toilet after she had used it.

One ought to have remembered more. But that was the only thing that had stuck.

They kept you for as long as they could at the children’s home. Only if they came to the conclusion that there was no alternative were you moved. There was only one kind of place to go to from there. That was to a residential assessment centre, for a limited period. I went to Brogårdsvænge in Gentofte, that was in ‘66. I remember nothing about why, in the file, the matron, Sister Ragna, had written “wayward, refuses to wear plus-fours”.

That is what it says, but one remembers nothing.

One time I showed it to Humlum. It was winter, at night. We were sitting on the toilets, up against the radiator. “I remember them,” he said, “baggy pants and long checked socks. The rest of them at the school wore desert boots and Fair Isle sweaters. You didn’t have anything else, it was like your skin, it got to the stage where you wanted to rip it off, rip your skin off, or something.”

He did not say whether he too had refused.

It was all downhill from the assessment centre. Because one was older there were more places they could send one. I was put into a boarding school for children whose development does not measure up to the norm, and from there to Nødeborgård Treatment Home.
That was in ‘67, I must have been ten.

Biehl’s Academy takes “normal” children and others from various institutions, with a mission to integrate them into “normal” society. Some of these “borderliners” are slow or perform well below their mental age. Others are academically sound but are traumatised for various reasons. In Katharine’s case, for example, the death of her mother followed by the suicide of her father has led to her admission to the school.

The narrator of the story is Peter, a strange child, obsessive and intelligent, with a long history of orphanages and care homes. When August is admitted into Biehl’s, he is watched over by the teachers, never allowed to move more than a foot away from the playground wall. He gasses himself on the cooker at night, just enough to be able to sleep. Peter and Katarina believe that he won’t survive school life and will be permanently institutionalised.

The school uses measurement rather than love to ‘treat’ its pupils, all personal relationships are frustrated and replaced by IQ tests and other ’systems’. It is a version of Hell.

Everyone involved in the sadistic and damaging experiments at Biehl’s Academy – the staff, the education minister, the caretaker, their families, everyone – except the children, believe that they are defending eternal values.

The school, always reminiscent of Kafka, brings to mind other establishments from the literary canon, Dickens’ Dotheboys Hall from Nicholas Nickleby, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

This is a difficult and inspiring novel, rich in meditations on the human condition. It was originally published in Denmark in 1993.

Who should I see in the store but Tessa Netterby whom I hadn’t seen for maybe a year. I felt badly I’d never got out to see her, because I used to try to keep up a sort of friendship after she dropped out of school. I think I was the only one that did. She was all wrapped up in a big shawl and she looked like something out of a storybook. Top Heavy, actually, because she has that broad face with its black curly mop and her broad shoulders, though she can’t be much over five feet tall. She just smiled, the same old Tessa. And I asked how she was – you always do that when you see her, seriously, because of her long siege of whatever it was that took her out of school when she was around fourteen. But also you ask that because there isn’t much else to think of to say, she is not in the world that the rest of us are in. She is not in any clubs and can’t take part in any sports and she does not have any normal social life. She does have a sort of life involving people and there is nothing wrong with it, but I wouldn’t know how to talk about it and maybe neither would she.

This collection of short stories has an introduction by Jonathan Franzen, in which he underlines Munro’s claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America.

I can’t argue with him. I read these stories and stand speechless before them. She makes me glad I’m alive. She dominates this world of the short-story, packs into it much more than I was ever aware that it could hold. And I’m a fan of the short-story, have been for years.

I’m always coming across people who tell me, I can’t be bothered with short stories, they’re over before they begin. I much prefer a novel.

And the novel is my own preference as well, but it shouldn’t close-out the possibility of other forms.

For anyone interested in the craft of writing, this book is a must. For anyone interested in poetry, please don’t miss it. You thinkers; you seekers after magic; you unbelievers; are you listening, paying close attention? And for all of you out there who are prepared to stand stupidly in front of this life of ours with a smile on your face and your mouth open, there is a genius at work in Alice Munro, don’t let it pass on the other side of the street.