Last of the Country Gentlemen

After Sunday Mass, I was given Last of the Country Gentlemen by a visitor who works for Mute Records. I had never heard of it or Josh T. Pearson. His photo – half cowboy, half Old Testament prophet – didn’t make me want to run to the c.d. player. But, a couple of days later, I did slip the disc into the machine and sat back with minimal expectations. The slow realisation flushed over me like some sort of ecstasy that I was listening to music with an absolutely unique aesthetic. By the time, I had finished listening to the seven love songs my eyes were moist, my heart was racing. These are songs that take an x-ray of all the fissures, shadows and splits in the fragile heart as it attempts to love. I am certain Last of the Country Gentlemen is one of the all time great albums about love.

There are two states that require a heightened artistic response. The language of the quotidian – the language of cleaning the cooker, going to the office – won’t do. The music of the shopping mall and pop charts won’t suffice. Love and death need a language and music that rises to the occasion, that speaks in a biblical fashion. Josh T. Pearson has found both the language and music to diagnose the cause of his love sickness.

The immediate cause was a failed relationship with a girl in Berlin - although it could be almost any failed relationship. Pearson captures the distinctive way that men grieve a lost love: masculine emotion tightened to a thick knot. This grief is spare, picked clean to the white of its bones. Loss is expressed with no taint of hysteria but with just a few guitar parts and the occasional addition of mournful strings. The language is measured, weighed in the scales of sadness. I ain’t your saviour or your Christ or your goddam sacrifice/And when I said I’d give my life, I weren’t talking suicide/ And I’m so tired of trying to make it right, for a girl who just won’t come to the light/night after night after night after Christ haunted night.

Josh T. Pearson’s voice could make desert stones cry. It’s as if he is placing his finger in the maggot infested decay of this relationship. He crawls with a sense of his own complicity in its death. Woman when I’ve raised hell, heaven knows you’re gonna know it/ Don’t make me rule this home with the back of my hand. At the same time his autopsy, eats him up from the inside out. He’s brought to his knees as he performs his own improvised funeral rites over the relationship’s carcass. Requiescat in pace. Amen.

Last of the Country Gentlemen is a little work of art.

Clybourne Park is a winner

I wrote recently about the play, Clybourne Park, now on at the Wyndhams Theatre, London. A number of people have contacted me about this blog post and it seems to have captured people's imagination. Well, last night Clybourne Park won a prestigious Olivier Award for Best New Play...and it is.

Sir Alex Ferguson and the sound of silence

The headline is Ferguson’s silence was music to the ears. Simon Barnes (referencing Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness as only this sports writer can) explains, “Sir Alex Ferguson (the manager of Manchester United) is giving a press conference today...After Manchester United’s defeat by Liverpool, Ferguson had spread a blanket of silence over his team. But now, alas, to the dismay of us all, he is talking to the world again. The horror! The horror!”

Ferguson’s monastic silence meant that there were “none of the usual claims about referees and how their incompetence cost his side the game...No rants against the media...No exclusion of journos who dare to suggest that United’s players and coaching staff are not all living saints...no pointed little sulks and vendettas against the BBC and others who had inspired his wrath...”

Silence, Barnes argues, would allow us to concentrate on what was really important – the football. “We’d have to talk about the players on the pitch instead of the personalities of the managers. We’d have to discuss the manager’s tactical abilities rather than his skills at verbal sniping. We’d have to deal with sport rather than soap opera.”

The whitenoise of meaningless, trivial, superficial words – the chattering of the commentating classes - makes us deaf to what is essential. Whether it is the person in front of the television or down the pub or in the office – we have convinced ourselves that we all have something of importance to say. There are those who do have something to say and then there is the majority, those legions of wagging tongues, who create a cacophony of discordant opinion.

Only silence provides us with an eloquence worth listening to. As the poet, R.S.Thomas puts it, "the silence holds with its gloved hand the wild hawk of the mind." Silence alone can hew that which is sublime and truthful from language. As in the prophet Isaiah, the seraph must touch our unclean lips with a glowing coal in order to purify them of all the inane banter, bigotry and innuendo. Perhaps, it is not a press conference that Sir Alex needs but a seraph's touch?

Simon Barnes also sees this silence as leading to “the eloquence of perfect action.” He ends with this riff and a delightful nod to John Keats:

I’m talking about the eloquence of perfect action: Dirk Kuyt’s goals against Manchester United, Tiger Woods at his best, Barcelona in full song, Jessica Ennis in full flight, Rebecca Adlington’s finish, Graeme Swann’s off break, Chris Ashton’s support play, Jonny Wilkinson’s tackling, Usain Bolt’s speed.

In sport, truth is action and action is truth. Perhaps in life as well. The rest is silence.

Racism, Frankie Boyle and Clybourne Park

Clybourne Park is a play of ideas but don’t let that put you off. This play is laugh out loud, scurrilously funny. But it is much more than a sophisticated sitcom or stand up routine. In the audience’s laughter our own positions and prejudices are revealed and reflected back to us. This is theatre that is highly entertaining and provocative.

The acting in Dominic Cooke's production is of the highest quality capturing the subtlest inflections of human nature, the camouflaged cruelties incubating in our relationships. The actors (and all of them contribute to the success of this production) flesh from Bruce Norris’s text, characters that are at once, theatrical (and so provide an audience with a critical distance with which to scrutinise their behaviour), and, at the same time, immediately recognisable as one of us (thus, shrinking any distance and mirroring all that we flinch from in ourselves). All the lazy dualisms of goodies and baddies, the virtuous and vicious evaporate and all the ambivalent, moral and psychological chiaroscuro in which the human person is shaped becomes solid.

This two act play runs like a perfectly calibrated Swiss watch. Set in two separate historical periods inhabited by different characters, the acts reference each other and show how the fears and anxieties of one age remain stubbornly alive in another. The buying and selling of property becomes the locus for the unspoken grievances, political and personal, that cross historical and cultural time zones. Yet, this is no crude piece of political agitprop. Instead, ideological positions are rooted in the shifting silt of human tragedy and loss that lies within us. Nevertheless, Clybourne Park is a play of fascinating ideas.

In a liberal, permissive society what, the play asks, can be classed as offensive? John Galliano’s anti-Semitic rants in a Parisian bar or the comedian, Frankie Boyle’s jokes at the expense of the disabled? Are certain things inherently offensive or is offense in the eye of the beholder? Bruce Norris uses the nature of humour to explore this. If you prefix every potentially offensive comment with a knowing wink and “it’s a joke” does that make it acceptable? Or does the degree of offense depend on how something is said, the context and by whom? Clybourne Park makes the point that the language that some black people may use among themselves would be considered unacceptable if used by white people.

Or, perhaps, there is some correlation between the gravity of the offense and the sensitivities of the listener? This struck me forcibly during the past week. I felt offended and insulted when someone made a comment about my height (or lack of it) and physical stature. Most of the time such comments never appear to land a blow (in fact, some of them are very funny and, if I may say so, they are usually the ones I make self-deprecatingly about myself), but at that particular moment the comment hurt. Hyper-sensitivity on my part or a real, verbal offense? Maybe the question is did the person who used the comment intend to belittle (excuse the pun) me and, if so, is that where the offense lies?



Clybourne Park considers all those things that make people outsiders. There are the obvious ones of race, gender, class, sexual orientation and religion that are constantly (and properly) brought to our attention. The current debate in the United Kingdom about multiculturalism highlights this. But Norris asks the more profound question: what are these “outsiders” placed outside of? Well, it may be that certain people or groups are placed outside the many rights (for example, to personal security) and freedoms (for example, to religious expression) that most people naturally benefit from. Such discrimination is unacceptable. But, it may also be that in this mortal life we all exist as outsiders, living outside the city walls, and the idea that there are insiders is just a powerful myth. Being an outsider is our commonality.

Grief, for example, makes us all outsiders, Norris suggests. In the first act, a couple grieve the death of their son and in turn, they become emotional pariahs in the community in which they live. The grieving, as the poet Christopher Reid writes, carry “an emptiness so heavy,/ I am inclined to call it my new born soul,/ though its state may be less an achieved pregnancy than a pregnancy/ lodged oddly, for lack of a womb, in a tight gap/ behind the sternum, mid-thorax, not far from my heart.” They bear the wound of loss that others cannot accept or recognise as being part of the human condition.

For all its ideas, Clybourne Park never forgets that we are made to live lives of praise and lamentation (either suppressed or in tears) and that it is in such expressions that we find our human identity and the possibility of reaching out to each other in tenderness. Apart from all the other things that there is to enjoy in this play, I think this sad-stirring element makes Clybourne Park a must-see.

The Rite

I have a film review of the new exorcism horror film, The Rite, in this week's edition of The Tablet. Below is a taster of the review. For the full review go to The Tablet.

The Rite is a horror film that wants to be taken seriously. Opening with a quotation from Pope John Paul II signals this ambition: “The battle against the Devil, which is the principal task of Saint Michael the Archangel, is still being fought today, because the Devil is still alive and active in the world.”

Inspired by Matt Baglio’s non-fiction book The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist, the screenwriter, Michael Petroni, claims to anchor his fictional narrative in these documented accounts of demonic possession. Petroni treats the existence of the supernatural realm without any hint of irony. From the outset, The Rite promises real theological intelligence and to be more than a sub genre remake of William Friedkin’s 1973 classic, The Exorcist.

The film’s opening sequence introduces Michael Novak (Colin O’Donoghue), a mortician’s son, who decides to enter seminary instead of becoming a partner in the family firm. As a deacon, Michael comes to believe that his vocation was an escape from his morose father and the fact that he could not afford a college education. He also begins to doubt his own faith and decides to leave. However, the seminary Rector witnesses Michael ministering to a woman fatally wounded in a car accident and impressed by this, persuades him to join a course in Rome that is training a crack team of exorcists.

Here Michael is introduced to a curmudgeonly Welsh Jesuit, Father Lucas Trevant played by Anthony Hopkins. This veteran exorcist may use unconventional methods but his record of success is almost unblemished and his fame has spread across the city. Lucas invites the sceptical deacon to attend the exorcism of a young pregnant woman. As she tears at her scalp and her eyes roll back, Lucas’s mobile phone rings. “I can’t talk now. I’m in the middle of something,” the Jesuit whispers. And when the session comes to an anticlimactic conclusion, Lucas asks Michael, “What did you expect? Spinning heads? Pea soup?” At this point, Michael’s conviction that these phenomena have a psychological explanation remains intact. “Choosing not to believe in the Devil won’t protect you from him,” Lucas warns his novice.

Neither O’Donoghue or Hopkins are able to find convincing priestly identities for their characters. There is never any sense that these priests have an interior spiritual life. The doubts they articulate feel like manufactured add-ons with none of the ambivalence associated with true spiritual struggle. No number of prayers mumbled in Latin can convince us that these men are anything more than clerical caricatures.

Cloning and Never Let Me Go

Spoiler Alert

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 Booker prize nominated novel, Never Let Me Go, has just been made into a film. The book is a subtle meditation on what it means to be a person. The film adaptation, while not able to match the philosophical nuances of the book, approaches the complex subject matter with visual and narrative restraint. The book is a classic. The film is worth catching.

Never Let Me Go is the story of a love-triangle between Kathy, Tommy and Ruth (played in the film by Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Kiera Knightley) which goes back to their school days at Hailsham. On the surface, the students of Hailsham are well groomed, well behaved and appear to have a charmed public school life. Yet, there are tell-tale signs that this institution has more disturbing intentions. There is a neurotic emphasis on the health of the children. Smoking behind the bike sheds is a mortal sin. There are apocryphal tales of the violent things that have happened to students who escaped beyond the school boundaries. The natural, unaffected joy that children bring to a school is absent here and replaced with an atmosphere of impending despair. Play is manufactured. Creativity is a social experiment. Hailsham is an educational limbo.

It transpires that the children at Hailsham are clones and are waiting to be used as adult organ donors. This is their sole purpose in life. The functional purpose that society has decided for them. They have been created to act as nothing more than biological spare part machines. Yet, of course, these clones are not robots, they have souls and they can love. These are the distinguishing features of a person. We are present to ourselves in self-conscious autonomy, yet we only possess ourselves fully when we give ourselves to the dynamism of love. This is not a passing pleasure or emotion, but the very meaning of our being alive, an awakening of our sense of being. All love is self-surrender and self-fulfillment.

Kathy, Tommy and Ruth have heard a rumour that love can defer their fate. Couples who can prove they are in love will be given some extra years before they must start donating their organs. But the threesome also realise themselves as persons when they fall in and out of love with each other. This is the primal and first of all impulses in the heart of being. Love is the intuitive sense that we are not to be instrumentalised but that each person has an obscure, living depth that must not be manipulated or destroyed.

Never Let Me Go never succumbs to sci-fi sensationalism. Both the novel and film are beautifully understated and this adds to the moral chill factor and sense of tragedy. It is the passive acceptance of cloning – both by those cloned and those involved in the process – and the lack of ethical debate that gives Never Let Me Go an authentic tone. The medical police state is unquestioningly accepted(except by one brave teacher who is quickly removed from Hailsham and branded a “subversive”). There is a passive resignation that this is how it is meant to be and that the proposed medical benefits outweigh the invasive manipulation and destruction of human life.

All this feels real and possible because we recognise (consciously or unconsciously) that the abuse of the person is happening in our own time. In 2000, Pope John Paul II addressed the 18th International Congress of the Transplantation Society where he highlighted the dangers of creating human life as though it were a medical product:

...methods that fail to respect the dignity and value of the person must always be avoided. I am thinking in particular of attempts at human cloning with a view to obtaining organs for transplants: these techniques, insofar as they involve the manipluation and destruction of human embryos, are not morally acceptable, even when the proposed end is good in itself.

Since that warning, the destruction of persons who are intrinsically valuable in themselves has become a routine part of contemporary culture. This has happened without us barely noticing. Not science fiction but reality. Now that is really frightening.

On Friendship II.

My previous blog was about friendship and it seems that I’m not the only one thinking about this at present. In a recent article (The Times February 7), Cosmo Landesman reflects on the fragility of friendship. Is this due to our friendships becoming more and more “virtual” due to social networking sites and less “real”? Is it the pressures and pace of contemporary living that make giving time to friends increasingly difficult? Landesman writes:

The sad truth is that my friends and I are seeing less of each other than ever before. I wonder: do my friends notice this change? Do they care? Do I?

Much has been written about the shallow and ephemeral nature of online friendships found through social network sites such as Facebook. But back in the real, offline world friendships – at least mine – are changing for the worse. Once, there was a clear division between on and offline friendships. Not now.

The great paradox of our time is that today we’ve never had so much technology – the Internet, e-mails, tweets, texts – to bring us closer to our friends. And yet we have been so distant from them. We can all stay in touch all the time – but we never seem to have the time to actually see each other.

...I believe that friendship has an etiquette of its own, and it has cost me dearly. I once had a beautiful, super-smart, sexy girlfriend – but she would never return my phone calls. It drove me nuts and so I had to end our relationship.

Friends like to tell you: I’ll be there for you. But I don’t want them to be there for me, I want them to return my phone calls and respond to invites to dinner! In other words, I want to feel that our friendship is important, and that it is shown in small acts of thoughtfulness.

I sometimes wonder, if I didn’t make the effort to see certain friends, would they make the effort to see me? So I called one of my oldest and dearest friends to ask him that question for this piece. He hasn’t returned my call – that was two days ago – so I don’t know the answer.

Friends! Who needs them?

Unfortunately, I do.

Is all this just the whimpering cry of some middle-aged neurotic? Or, the rose tinted longing for some golden age of friendship that may or may not have existed? Is friendship possible in our crooked times?

Landesman’s anxieties have been shared by everyone who takes friendship seriously. Friendships are fragile and complex ways of relating. This is, in part, because the desire “to become one instead of two” in friendship is not the same as the unity that lovers seek. Whereas lovers strive to obliterate the distance that separates them by fusing themselves one to another, friendship cherishes the distance that exists between two individuals. What unifies friends is the discipline and effort of maintaining their mutual distance in love. If that distance is threatened by desire, domination or possessiveness then the friendship will begin to corrode and disintegrate.

“The simple fact of having pleasure in thinking in the same way as the beloved being, or in any case the fact of desiring such an agreement of opinion, “ writes the French thinker, Simone Weill, “attacks the purity of friendship at the same time as its intellectual integrity. It is very frequent. But at the same time pure friendship is rare.”

Friendship delights in the fact that there are two distinct persons involved in a loving relationship. The two friends consent to remain two and to celebrate not only the things they share in common, but above all their differences. Friendships are possibly the only relationships where individuals do not have to disguise or compromise their differences. They have the rare liberty of being themselves. It is the difference and space that exists between them that gives them the freedom to hide nothing and fear nothing. Friendship is, in the words of St Augustine, "sweet beyond all the sweetness of life that I had experienced." That is why they are important, precious and very rare.