178: Just another tapestry
Richard Flanagan, King Lear, Brian Klaas, Claire Keegan and Oprah Winfrey, Maud Gonne, and Philip Larkin's Christmas.
The penultimate Fortnightly this year: it will sneak back a week early next Saturday with my annual Books of the Year edition, to give you time to shop before Christmas.
And here’s a chance to treat yourself for Christmas with a year’s discount supporting The Fortnightly and receiving The Occasional (with full access to archives):
Question 7
won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Richard Flanagan last week, and it sounded interesting, so I read it this week, and I’m still recovering. No time to write at more length (and I need to think more about it), but scattered notes for now:
It starts like Sebald, and like Sebald you’re never quite sure where it’s going. But Flanagan knows exactly what he’s doing.
Personal link: we’re about the same age, and both our fathers were locked up in WW2. Though I haven’t yet won the Booker Prize.
In an interview, Flanagan said: [during Covid] I had lived, I realised, in the autumn of things, and the world I had grown up in was irrevocably lost. I felt the shades of my long dead parents near me and wanted to hold them close and did it the only way I knew how: with words.
An early passage: Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings - why we seem the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of ‘why’. But there is no truth. There is only ‘why’. And when we look closer we see that behind that ‘why’ is just another tapestry.
It leads us into the lives of the atomic physicist Leo Szilard, and the writers H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, and how each was significant in Flanagan’s own life in an extraordinary chain.
It’s disconcerting and edgy: Anne Enright wrote that 'it is one of those books where a writer bundles up his entire life and hurls it on to the page.’
A section close to the end describing Flanagan’s near-death in a river is astonishing. You know of course that he survives, but still feel he might die. It drains you.
Contingency
is the key idea of Fluke: chance, chaos, and why everything matters by
. I spoke about it to our school on Wednesday morning, and after that wrote another in a series of essays on Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, mentioning Fluke and bringing in King Lear, Richard Flanagan, Robert Frost and W.B. Yeats on Maud Gonne.This one is about the decision-making process, if that is what it is, that goes through Bill Furlong in the novel.
Professor Diarmuid Ferriter’s
opinion column in the Irish Times last week, about the new film version of Small Things Like These, is paywalled, but if you can’t see it, it was headed
Cillian Murphy’s view of Ireland in the 1980s as ‘the dark ages’ misses the point. Small Things Like These raises a wider question about the communication of our history as one giant, black cloud occasionally interrupted by a lone, bright star.
My letter published in the paper the next morning responding to this is below.
Curiously, the film has stirred up some reactionary sentiment in a way the book did not: perhaps the reality of seeing the darkness of the story in such an immediate way.
Oprah Winfrey
has chosen Small Things Like These for her Book Club: a fabulous boost for sales. Claire Keegan’s quiet story which came out before Christmas 2021 has really taken off: the novel was an immediate success, it has been widely adopted in Irish schools (thus my webinars for teachers this term), the film has kept up the momentum, and now Oprah…
Robert Caro
makes regular appearances in the Fortnightly, most often of course for his masterpiece on LBJ. Here’s some Caro catnip: Bryan Cranston (great voice) reading from the opening of The Power Broker, another astonishing book. The rhythms of the prose…
King Lear scene by scene:
More episodes (the full list). Just two to go.
Act 4 scenes 1 and 2: (above) the first in the immediate aftermath of Gloucester’s blinding, the second an opportunity to look at the character development of Albany throughout the play.
Act 4 scenes 3, 4, 5 and 6, including the extraordinary meeting of Lear and Gloucester in their much-changed states.
Teaching and Learning Things:
#edchatie on Bluesky on Monday night was fun. As John Hurley wrote, I've missed this! The serious talk, and the bit of banter. Real sense of community, and of the respect we have for each other. Here’s my account, and list of the topics suggested so far for future chats. Do add to them, and volunteer as a host! Feedback form on the post.
Conor Murphy on the shape his English Leaving Cert course will have to take if mistaken reforms are enacted in Ireland:
No development of creativity. No development of critical thinking. Promotion of rote learning. Promotion of ‘cheating’. No development of a student’s voice or sense of self-worth. This fills me with a sense of dread. And, in the end, I’ll be fine. But the students will suffer and, inevitably, so will society.
Alan Gorman on ‘teacher-bashing’ in Ireland and around the world:
One reason for this trend lies in the convenience of teacher bashing for policymakers, especially those pursuing economically driven education reforms. By positioning teachers as resistant to change or as obstacles to progress, policymakers can avoid deeper discussions about the need for increased funding, systemic reform, or improved support structures.
on ‘Becoming a Nation of Non-Readers’ (USA):
As for enabling students to understand more complex text—including classic novels and nonfiction, which also generally requires more effort to comprehend—teachers may need to do more instruction than they’re used to, or at least engage in a different kind of instruction.
Et Cetera
- on the importance of Shakespeare to Germans:
As a nation, Germans are so obsessed with Shakespeare that he remains the most-played author on the country’s stages with more performances each year than in England.
- on a tragic loss:
Sacrificing our friends and family for a job seems ludicrous in principle, and yet it is so easily done. How often have we arranged to meet people who mean the world to us, only to cancel because of late nights, lack of energy, or just conflicting demands? How much have we allowed people to drift because we believe they will always be there?
The Irish Times Best Books of 2024 [€], compiled by Martin Doyle. Anne Enright chooses Question 7 (see top); Joseph O’Connor the novel The Amendments by Niamh Mulvey; Paul Muldoon goes for Clair Wills’s Missing Persons, or my grandmother’s secrets, which will be on my own list this week. Lots more.
I need to return to Anita Brookner, who I used to read regularly why she was alive. JacquiWine is writing well on her nowadays, such as this on Fraud.
One to watch if you’re in Ireland: Fintan O’Toole: A Life in Our Times, which draws on his book We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958, is on RTÉ One on Wednesday, December 11th, at 9.35pm.
A surprising thing: the Philip Larkin Society is selling Larkin Christmas cards, above.
The passage in Question 7 where Flanagan excoriates the British empire (and Oxford) is very arresting “‘White Australians still struggle to come to terms with their colonial past,’ the English Independent—a Martian newspaper—declared in 2009, its Harrow needles beginning their work, inescapable as a man trap, as if the genocide was our invention and not theirs, as though the totalitarian slave system was our choice and not their gulag. How marvellous, to have an empire, reap its robbed riches, and yet etch its colonial failings on the colonised, to write on our bodies that we were the vulgar arriviste, the barbarian, the savage, that their judgement was our crime.”