Reluctant Irishman

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Once upon a time...

...there was a country that had no government. Other countries before had lost their government for a while but they always got it back, even if it took as long as 249 days. This country, though, was able to keep going for longer. In fact, even after a year it still doesn't have one.

All the same, the people don't seem to be unhappy - well, of course some of them are but not apparently any more than there were when there was a Government. For the most part, they get on with drinking some of the best beers in the world, eating what are definitely the best chips in the world, getting looked after in hospitals that are better than the ones you find in most countries where there is a government - and so on.

The country in question is, of course, Belgium - a country where I lived for three and a half years (they did have a government then) and which has many happy and exciting memories for me. It's the country where I've set the story I'm working on at the moment and I happen to be visiting it this week. Moreover, despite the gibe about finding it hard to name ten famous Belgians, it has given us more than its share of Europe's great painters, as well as people like Adolphe Sax, Georges Simenon, Jacques Brel - and let's not forget Jean-Claude van Dam (sorry, scratch that - I wish we could forget him). It would be at least as hard to name ten famous Swiss.

The reason it has no Government, of course, is that, despite being at the centre of the rich medieval territories of Flanders and Burgundy, it has only been a nation State for less than two-hundred years and lacks a real sense of national identity. Before that the territories that make it up bounced back and forth - in bits and pieces - between Burgundy, Austria, Spain, France and the Netherlands. It's divided along linguistic lines between those who speak French and those who speak Flemish, which is, essentially a dialect of Dutch (there is a tiny German-speaking minority but they are too small to make a difference). The two linguistic cultures have a long history of mutual mis-treatment. While one could argue that it was the French speakers who "started it", by now there's a pair of them in it. So they have ended up with a political system which is paralysed when the representatives of the two main language communities can't agree on power-sharing - exactly what happened last June.

Will it break up? I doubt it. The Flemish are just as estranged from the Dutch by their conservatism and Catholicism as they are from the French speakers for other reasons. And the French tend to regard their co-linguists with patronising contempt. Moreover, it is fundamentally a wealthy country - home of the EU infrastructure and a burgeoning IT industry.

All the same, it has problems that will need a government if they are to be fixed. Apart from the time and energy wasted by sniping between the language communities, there is a growing national debt, as well as issues of race integration and a massive State bureaucracy.

I hope it comes through these woes. For now, Vive la Belgique!

Monday, June 20, 2011

Is it just me?

We all have experience of works that are trumpeted as great works of art but that we just don't see what the fuss is about. For a lot of people, it's Joyce's Ulysses - a view that I think it is unfair, even though much of the praise for the book is also uncritical.

On the operatic front, for years that was how I felt about Verdi's La Traviata. I thought it was decorative music that didn't do justice to the real poignancy of the story. Now that I understand Verdi's style better I see the work in context and I no longer take that view (you can stop spinning in your grave now, Pepe). On the symphonc front, Bruckner is a composer who I feel is grossly overrated, with the exception of his 4th symphony, though I expect I would be less in a minority there.

In terms of fiction, my bugbear are the very two of Thomas Hardy's novels that are held as his greatest achievements: Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. In both of these novels, I feel that the plots are contrived and sentimental, and that the books - Jude especially - are really thinly disguised social tracts. That is not to say that Hardy is without talent - The Mayor of Casterbridge is a favourite of mine - one of the great works of 19th century English fiction, almost perfect in its construction, its characterisation and its poignancy. Far from the Madding Crowd, for that matter, is a delightful love story (it's a shame he didn't write more stories with happy endings). It's simply that Hardy over-reaches himself in these last two books so that his deep and sincere social concern cloud his instincts as a writer. Thankfully, he concentrated on poetry for the remaining thirsty years of his life and his poetry deserves even more recognition).

Some people might say the same of Dickens (and, in cases such as Hard Times, you would be right in my view). However, while most readers nowadays acknowledge Dicken's sentimentality and tendency to preach, it is his comic gift, he ability to caricature and his sometimes grotesque imagination that are his unique talents and make him continuedly deserving of his reputation.

Anyway, that's just what I think and who am I to judge?

Thursday, June 16, 2011

The stone and the flower

In the world above, a magical, sentient stone is left behind and neglected after having been overlooked when a Goddess was mending the Heavens. The stone falls in love with a crimson petal flower and waters the flower every day. In time, the flower is transformed into a fairy girl, who promises to repay her debt of water to the stone by descending into the world of men and shedding tears for him there.

Thus opens one of the most amazing books I have ever read, the unfinished Qing Dynasty Chinese novel entitled The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin (also known as The Dream of the Red Chamber), which I read in the version completed by Gao E, subsequently translated by David Hawkes and John Minford (available in five volumes from Penguin Classics).

After the quasi-mythical opening scene, the rest of this novel takes place firmly on the ground in the houses of a wealthy Beijing family in which the stone is reincarnated as Jia Baoyu ("precious jade"), a boy on the edge of puberty and the flower as Lin Daiyu, an intelligent, beautiful but sickly girl consumed by love for Baoyu. The third corner of the tragic love triangle is formed by Xue Baochai, a cousin of Baoyu's - also pretty and well educated but more conventional than Daiyu - who, almost from her first appearance, is designated by the family as Baoyu's prospective marriage partner.

You could call the story a Chinese Upstairs Downstairs as it progresses through the late childhood and early adulthood of the main characters, weaving in an endless array of detailed sub-stories and vignettes about the other members of this extended family and their cohort of servants - their maids in particular. Meals, tea ceremonies, religious practices, medical procedures and many other aspects of eighteenth century Chinese life are described in fascinating detail (don't read the book when you're hungry!). However, while the story is comparable to the TV soap opera in terms of scale and the fact that it covers servants as well as gentry, it goes withpout saying that it also far outstrips the series in terms of its lyricism and depth. Among the characters that stand out in my mind are Baoyu's aunt by marriage, Wang Xifeng, married to the feckless Jia Lin. She plays the role of dutiful daughter-in-law perfectly - pretty, intelligent, a good household manager but at times frighteningly ruthless. Also noteworthy is the authoritarian matriarch Grandmother Jia, who as the oldest member of the family is also its head. Among the servants, Hua Xiren and Qingwen, both maids of Baoyu, stand out. The former is also his unofficial concubine; the latter falls victim to Xifeng's jealousy. Indeed, the female characters are, in general, much the stronger ones; their male counterparts are often feckless and irresponsible (one exception being Baoyu's father, Jia Zheng, who is a strict Confucian scholar and disciplinarian).

The three themes that ultimately bind this sprawling novel together are: the tragic resolution of the relationship between Baoyu and Daiyu; the collapse of the family's fortunes; and Baoyu's metamorphosis from an immature young man to one who achieves spiritual enlightement and withdraws from the everyday world.

It's quite daunting to start out on a novel of nearly 2,500 pages but, trust me, it's worth it!

Burning Bright

In the early 1990s there were estimated to be 7,600 of them remaining in the wild; now there are only 3,200. I am talking, of course, about the tiger, the biggest and most iconic memeber of the cat family, and a towering figure in human culture, including William blake's famous poem.

Not only have the numbers plummeted but three of the nine subspecies are extinc, while a fourth is almost certainly extinct in the wild. A fifth is only just hanging on and its future hangs in the balance.

With these statistics one might almost be tempted to throw in the towel - especially since there is no lack of tigers in captivity. However, captive tigers will lose much of their attraction in our eyes if we also lose the charismatic image of the wild tiger, stalking the frozen wastes of Siberia, the forests of the Mekong or the swamps of the Sunderbans.

Besides, the figures hide some successes. Amur (Siberian) tiger numbers were at an all time low (less than 100) in the 1960s but have climbed back into the 400s today. India, which is home to approximately half of the world's tigers (the rest being spread among 12 other countries) has had spectacular local successes in some of its national parks (although failures in others) and the latest count records an overall slight increase.

What is driving the overall decline, though? Currently, the main driver is the demand for tiger parts - especially bone - for traditional Chinese medicine. The skin market, although less important, is still significant in some regions. However, much of the poaching is done by snares where deer, wild pigs etc. are the primary target - for their meat, of course. Apart from the fact that poachers will not pass off the gain to be made from a tiger that is found in a snare, this poaching is also depriving the tiger of its food base. Apart from these threats, bad infrastructure planning and human-tiger conflict also contribute to the declining numbers.

I have only seen a wild tiger once, in Corbett National Park, in India. Before going there, a friend said to me: "When we were in Corbett, half of us saw a tiger and the other half didn't". On clarification, she explained that she was in the half that didn't. When I was there just a week later as part of a large group, the experience was similar, but I was lucky enough to be with the "half that did".

Last year was the Chinese Lunar Year of the Tiger and leaders of the 13 tiger range countries contributed to a doubling of the numbers by the next time the cycle comes around in 2022. It remains to be seen if this is achieved. It would be an achievement that the countries can be proud of.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Down time

Sorry it has taken so long to post any more stuff on the blog but, on top of travel (Bergen, Dublin and Thailand after Vienna) I've been moving flat.

I'll post someting shortly related to the Thailand trip but the prospect of the flat move had me stressed for several months before it actually happened. Because of the narrow time window after I came back from my travls, I decided to hare movers to do the whole thing. It helped that the move was within the same building (albeit 8 floors up in a very slow lift) so a week ago exactly I was greeted at 8 in the morning by five heftily built men - mostly Portuguese. From then until when they left at 4 it was fairly hectic as they always seemed to be asking me several questions at once - where to put this bed, that picture, etc. Still, when they left the old apartment was bare, while anything that has to be reassembled or screwed into the wall in my new flat had been taken care of. It took me another day to finish unpacking and rearranging but now I'm comfortably installed and already entertaining a visitor.