Reading etc.

I picked up “Restless” by William Boyd the other day. I loved “Any Human Heart” and I was looking forward to this. It’s not bad but it’s not good either. It’s a spy thriller which is not a genre that I am very keen on but it kept me turning pages. The story is told by two female narrators; a mother who was a spy in the second world war and her daughter who is finding out about it in the 1970s. I found his female voice for the daughter particularly unconvincing and rather jarring although I was pleased to see that whenever he had her jaunting off, he carefully placed her child in the hands of a friend who appears to have been introduced to the story solely to provide babysitting services. The ending is very good but, overall, could try harder.

For my birthday, I got “Tom Bedlam” by George Hagen from the publishing exec. It thrills me to the core to have clutched in my little paw a book with the words “uncorrected proof not for sale or quotation” emblazoned on the cover. I really loved his first book, “The Laments”. It reminded me quite a bit of John Irving but whereas I find he can be a bit cloying, I thought Mr. Hagen much less so. Like John Irving then, but less annoying though he is also a fan of the alarming accident to move the plot along.

His second book is very different from his first. It is Dickensian. It is set in Victorian London and, by gum, it teams with characters. I suspect it is deliberately Dickensian and I wonder whether the Limkin family are intended as some kind of nod to Dickens’s own family with Oscar the parliamentary reporter as Dickens (this sentence should read “Look at me, am I not clever? Yes, yes, you’re right, I’m a genius”). I am not sure that this works for Mr. Hagen. Dickens does Dickens better and the comparison doesn’t do Mr. Hagen any favours. I feared the worst.

The early sexual fumblings of our hero reminded me unpleasantly of Henry’s sexual awakening in “A Star called Henry” which is a dreadful Roddy Doyle book. I would say his worst but I haven’t been foolish enough to read its sequels. Unpropitious but, in fact, I really enjoyed it in the end. It requires an enormous suspension of disbelief as the characters’ lives cross and re-cross in deeply unlikely ways, but I found that quite entertaining. I was sorry to finish it, particularly since the ending was a bit weak compared to the rest of the book. Nevertheless, great stuff overall and am eagerly awaiting his next offering.

From the front page of the Sunday before last’s Observer:

“Washington and London accuse Iran of widespread interference in Iraq”

Enoch Powell said that “All political careers end in failure”. I love that quote. My own observations suggest that many political careers end up with relatives. Politics in Ireland is hereditary. Parliament seats pass from father to son and uncle to niece. And it’s clearly not the only place. Just thinking about poor old Chelsea Clinton. Imagine the pressure, if both her parents are some day ex-presidents of the US. What possible career could she have that would match up to that? Look what it did to George Bush having only one parent as president. And did you know that the Polish president and Prime Minister are twins? No, truly. You can play a game here to try and tell them apart.

Finally, great news, our house is vomit free and we are all back in our respective places of detention.

On Tuesday night, I endangered my marriage by sitting up in bed with the light on until 1.30 am loudly turning pages while Mr. Waffle huffed and tossed and turned. All this to finish “Wives and Daughters” by Mrs. Gaskell. So there I am febrilely turning pages; Cynthia is married and dispatched and all that stands between Molly and Roger is six months in Africa. I realise that only three pages of the tome remain. Odd. Mrs. Gaskell is not one to finish abruptly. This is the kind of novel where there should be a couple of chapters on Molly and Roger’s children sitting on the Squire’s knee. We should hear what happens Cynthia and the Gibsons. When I reached the end it was to discover that the novel was unfinished. Words are totally inadequate to express my indignation but I tried when speaking to the friend who recommended it to me.

Me: “Wives and Daughters” is an unfinished novel.

Him: Mmmm.

Me (ominously): Why didn’t you tell me?

Him: But everyone knows that. It’s what everyone says about it “it’s her

best novel and it’s unfinished”.

Me: Not me or anyone I’ve spoken to.

Him: Can I help it that you don’t come from a literary household?

Me: Speechless indignation. Esprit d’escalier suggests that I should have responded “in our literary household we are not given to reading Victorian potboilers and the talk is all of Samuel Johnson”.

Him: But it makes it almost modern, doesn’t it, that abrupt ending?

Me: But I didn’t want to read a modern novel, I was reading a Victorian novel and to find after 648 pages that it is UNFINISHED is deeply unsatisfactory.

Him: Yes, I suppose, it was the most ill-timed heart attacks in the history of literature. But it could have been worse, imagine, if it had been Graham Greene.

Me: Eh?

Him: Apparently he used to finish his work mid sentence and pick up and finish it off in the morning.

In other reading unhappiness, at bedtime the other night, we decided to read to the Princess from a book of fairytales that a friend of mine gave her for Christmas. It’s a book for slightly older children but it is beautifully presented and illustrated and the Princess is getting interested in stories with more text and fewer pictures. I read through the table of contents and, of course, she picked the story in the middle entitled “The Girl with no Hands“. I had never heard it before but let me tell you one thing, they’re called the Brothers Grimm for a reason. This story has as its centrepiece a girl whose father chops off her hands. Great bedtime reading. I found it quite disturbing but both the Princess and her father when I showed it to him later were unmoved as it all finishes happily in the end.

To recover from it all, I’m reading Mavis Cheek, who, despite her dreadful name, is fantastic; faber’s only chick-lit author, what more could a girl ask for?

I was 20 in 1989 when the Berlin wall came down. I remember with great distinctness a time when the only Eastern Europeans you heard of were, faintly glamourous, refugees from despotic regimes. And there weren’t many of them. I had never met anyone from Eastern Europe. It was an impossibly alien place. When I was 15, I went to Berlin on a German exchange. I stared at the wall in fascination. When we drove through miles and miles of dreary East German countryside to get to the Black Forest in prosperous West Germany for holidays, I was spellbound (it is, of course, just my luck that instead of staying in exciting Berlin, I spent my time with my German exchange walking in Bavaria; they announced the impending trip to me as a great treat on the day of my arrival, sigh). And those countries were lumped together. They didn’t really have individual characteristics. They were just a big homogenous lump of grey soviet dictatorships with poor, poorly dressed people with badly dyed hair. I remember a Finnish colleague telling me that in Estonia they could watch Finnish TV (Estonian is very closely related to Finnish – aren’t you lucky to have me to explain these things to you?) and the state said that the cookery programmes where they said “take three eggs” were just propaganda because nobody has three eggs.

And now, it is so different. These countries are all distinct to me. My friend and neighbour is Czech. I have realised that Czech women are very pretty but this is, most unfairly for Czech women, not true for the men. If you are Czech and a woman, your surname must end in ova or they will laugh at you. This is why Sharon Stone is known as Sharon Stoneova there and Jane Austen as Jane Austenova. I cannot say why I find this hilarious. I have discovered that Slovak is a different language from Czech, I could probably find Bratislava on a map; I have worked with people from there and, if I play my cards right, I may even get to visit. I have worked with lots of Poles. My lovely cleaner is Polish and taught the Princess to sing songs in Polish. The industrious Polish plumber has become a standing joke. I heard an English comedian describe the Poles as “coming to this country and doing our jobs; not taking our jobs, doing our jobs”. I know about the poor East of the country and the more prosperous West. I can name the main regions and pronounce Łódź. I think Ryanair fly there from Cork. Two Estonian women come and clean my parents’ house for a couple of hours a fortnight. The Latvians are particularly unfond of the Russians, which is unfortunate for the significant Russian minority living there. Riga has become the stag party capital of Europe. Thank you Latvia for taking from Dublin that singularly unappealing honour. I have seen Lithuanian politicians in action and they seem to be a strong minded bunch. Romanian is a romance language; Bulgarian is not. Thank you Bulgaria for bringing cyrillic to the EU thereby adding a third alphabet to the existing pair. I have been horribly lost in Sofia and know that next time I go back, I should go straight to Plovdiv. Slovenia markets itself as the sunny side of the Alps and got through the war in the Balkans scot free. The Slovenians are rather glamourous and they are richer than all the other Eastern European countries. I once had to strip off with a Slovenian colleague to go to a sauna while on a work trip. These things form a bond. The Hungarians speak a fiendishly difficult language, one which Irish people are trying to get to grips with as they buy up large parts of Budapest. I could go on and on, but I’ll stop now.

You used to be able to spot the Eastern Europeans in Brussels for their meetings; those clothes, that hair. I’m not saying that all is sweetness and light now but you can’t tell them on the streets of Brussels. They have all acquired this standard eurocrat gloss. As you walk around the streets of the capital of Europe, you see many people dressed in a sort of standard eurocrat costume; for the most part beautifully turned out and expensively dressed (I say for the most part as the European institutions also seem to harbour the odd hippy – touching) and they could be from anywhere, but in a good way. Yesterday, the Princess and I had breakfast in the Pain Quotidien on the Sablon and sitting opposite us were three women; one teenager with hair extensions and a languid manner sporting very trendy clothes with brand names unknown to me, one older sophisticated grandmother and one woman about my age. They looked like the usual clientele, BCBG types having Sunday brunch (the Princess and I like to go there so that people can oooh and aah at our crumpled, grubby, cheap clothes), in fact the only thing that marked them out as different, and not so very different was that they were speaking in some Eastern European tongue (if pushed, I would go for Hungarian, it seemed so hard). So, on this basis alone, I do not generally mock the European Union. It’s not responsible for the collapse of communism but, it is certainly responsible for bringing those countries into the European mainstream and ensuring that they have the funds necessary to promote the kind of growth that supports bored teenagers in the Pain Quotidien.

I believe in the European Union. I believe it has value as an idea and it produces much useful work. However, I would be the first to concede that the writing style of a Union which has 23 official languages can be a little, ahem, special. Also a little cliched (who am I to criticise?). Below is some information on a European strategy. I have deleted the details of the actual strategy and I believe it could be used for almost any of the fine documents which regularly emanate from the Union. Take this and put it in your drawer. If you ever need to write a European strategy, your problems are solved by this one size fits all solution. A small prize, as yet undetermined (perhaps a reply to your comment, for a change) will be given to anyone who guesses correctly the actual field to which this text applies:

Our strategy consists of a number of elements which aim at stimulating the definition and implementation of national strategies that, based on a detailed evaluation of the national situation, establish quantitative objectives for reducing the incidence of X. We will focus on the most common risks and the most vulnerable Y. We also want to improve and simplify existing legislation as well as to enhance its implementation in practice through non-binding instruments such as, guidelines to help companies to implement legislation, exchange of good practices, awareness raising campaigns and better information and training. It also focuses on mainstreaming of Z in other policy areas and finding new synergies and improved identification and evaluation of potential new risks. It requires the commitment of all parties, national authorities, social partners, etc, and the European Agency for Z.

The European Union is 50 on March 25. Happy Birthday to it.

On the Princess’s CD of French songs for children (never did I think I would know so many French songs for children) there are a range of classic numbers including the one about selling liver “oh ma foi, c’est la dernière fois que je vends du foie dans la ville de Foix”. The hilarity here is that, in French, foi, fois, foie and Foix are all pronounced identically, oh how we laugh. There’s the one about the woman whose husband was so small that the cat mistook him for a mouse. It appears to have been an arranged marriage.

“Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre” is another popular number. It is sung to the tune of “For he’s a jolly good fellow” but the words work better and it is, apparently, the original. The song is about General John Churchill (yes, same Churchills), First Duke of Marlborough who enjoyed regular victories against the French in the War of the Spanish Succession 1701-14 (no, please, stop me, if I’m boring you); this account of the battle of Oudenarde will give you an idea of why Malborough was so deeply unpopular with the French. Apparently the battle of Malplaquet was what actually inspired the songwriter to get writing but that seems to have gone less well for the Duke; I digress, to summarise, he was not well liked by the French forces.

So this song runs to 18 verses (yes, that’s right, 18) and we often listen to it on long drives; it drowns out the howling. I have trawled the internet for an English translation for you but could only find it in the original and German for some odd reason. It’s all quite tame compared to the Irish offerings. It recounts how Marlborough’s wife is waiting for news of him and hears he’s dead “mort et enterré”. The funeral is described as being very proper with officer pall bearers, a rossignol (which I think is a swallow) singing and rosemary (why?) planted round the grave. It doesn’t seem to me that offensive to the Duke, particularly when you reflect that he actually died of old age in his bed at 72 (look, it was a lot older then that it is now) but it must have seemed so to them, I gather Napoleon liked to hum it.