Armed and dangerous

In 2007 a student at Virginia Tech shot and killed 32 people. I was living in America at the time, and I heard a man on the radio argue earnestly and in measured tones that to reduce the chances of such a thing happening again students on college campuses should be allowed to carry concealed weapons. It took me a moment to realise he was serious. I honestly hadn’t thought of this solution before. 

Since then I’ve become more familiar with the reasoning of the gun lobby. Last week I heard an impressive and moving interview with the parents of one of the 20 children killed in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The father made an eloquent plea for change. ‘Something in our society,’ he said, ‘needs to be healed.’ He urged American parents to ask themselves, ‘What is it worth doing to keep your children safe?’ Into my head, unbidden, came the answer. ‘You can buy yourself a gun for a start.’ I didn’t mean it, but I’m sure there were plenty of others saying the same thing, who did. 

An attachment to guns has often seemed like a requirement for holding high office in America, almost as essential as believing in God. Running for the presidency in 2004, John Kerry made sure to get himself photographed, in combat fatigues, on a duck shoot. Being a decorated war hero wasn’t enough. When Hilary Clinton was running in the Democratic Primary against Obama in 2008 she claimed to have always enjoyed shooting ducks. At least Obama was spared this indignity. Even if he'd been tempted to pose loading a gun, imagine how those 'optics' would have played with the demographic Kerry and Clinton were reaching for. 

Now that gun control legislation is back on the agenda, some Democrats are still wheeling out their animal-killing credentials, as if only that will earn them the right to join the conversation. Joe Manchin, Democratic senator from West Virginia, put it this way: ‘I just came with my family from deer hunting. I’ve never had more than three shells in a clip. Sometimes you don’t get more than one shot anyway at a deer. I don’t know anyone in the hunting or sporting arena that goes out with an assault rifle. I don’t know anybody that needs 30 rounds in the clip to go hunting. I mean, these are things that need to be talked about.’

It’s strange the way deer and wildfowl keep getting dragged into the argument, because whatever the Second Amendment is about it’s not about hunting. What it actually says is that ‘A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ That seems to mean that the country should be equipped to defend itself against foreign attack, though it might conceivably mean that individual states should be equipped to defend themselves against an oppressive federal government. 

For many Americans it seems to be about something different – your right as an individual to protect yourself from someone who breaks into your house or tries to rob your store or attacks you in the street. For a hardcore minority it’s about your right as an individual to protect yourself against the agents of a government that's infringing your basic liberties.

Either way, forget duck-shooting. If you want to respond in kind to an assault from a homicidal thug (or a federal agent, if that's your concern) you'd better be armed with whatever they’ve got. And you’d better have it ready. An unloaded handgun, safely locked away where your kids won’t be able to play with it, won’t do you much good if an armed criminal breaks into your house. If a crazy person opens fire in the shopping mall, even your semi-automatic Bushmaster is useless if you’ve left it at home. On its own terms, the logic of the gun lobby seems unanswerable. Violence in school? Arm the teachers. Violence on campus? Arm the students. Violence in the streets? Arm everyone.

The only counter to this line of reasoning is the cumulative evidence of what really happens. A child finds a loaded weapon and kills someone by mistake. An angry boyfriend, who might otherwise throw a fist, pulls a trigger. A law-abiding citizen reaches for a gun to defend himself and is beaten to the draw – because, outside of daydreams of rescue and revenge, psychopathic killers and crazy people usually beat law-abiding citizens to the draw.  

These days I live in London, near to a place called Newington Butts, which is now mainly a housing estate. The name ‘Newington’ indicates that at some point in the middle ages it was a new settlement. A ‘butt’ is a target for archery practice. Newington became Newington Butts in the sixteenth century because archers trained here. It was England’s longbowmen who had won the battle of Agincourt in 1415 and thereby defeated the French. And in 1511 Henry VIII had decreed that all men under the age of 40 should own a bow and arrow, reasoning, no doubt, that a well armed militia being necessary to the security of a free state he’d better make sure Englishmen knew how to handle a longbow.

If I woke up one morning and bought myself a bow – a lightweight aluminium number with a quiver full of steel-tipped arrows – and wandered through Newington Butts with it, maybe I could try that argument out on the local constabulary.

Early collaborations

I drifted through Grammar School in one of the lower streams. I worked out later that it wasn’t only the boys who were streamed – in some subjects it was the teachers as well. In particular, there was a dynamic English department of which I was barely conscious. Meanwhile our English teachers were the backwoodsmen. They were less than enthusiastic but I liked them. Worse things can happen at school than benign neglect.

For a couple of years we had Alf (as I’ll call him here), a non-specialist who, having overseen the decline of his own subject, was kept occupied overseeing us. Our weekly homework was usually a list of three or four essay titles, dictated out of his head into our exercise books: The Worst Holiday, My Hobby, Loneliness – that kind of thing. The last on the list was always the same: Anything else you can think of. His comments on my work were laconic. 15/20 Good. 14/20 Quite good. 16/20 Good if original. For an essay on Crowds, I cut out and glued a picture from the Gloucestershire Echo of people waiting on the platform to see the Queen pass through the local station. I pointed out the danger that the people at the back might push forward in their excitement, throwing the people at the front under the Royal train. Alf wrote: 14/20 Not very likely.

It was probably my father who’d given me that thought. Health and safety was one of his things. But he was good at stories too. Under the generous rubric of Anything else you can think of, he helped me with a few tales of adventure – first person narratives, often set, I realise now, in the pre-War world of my father’s imagination, in which a couple of pals might set off on their bicycles into the countryside in pursuit of a burglar, to be congratulated by the local constable once the burglar was safely behind bars. I did all the writing, but he was happy to feed me plot ideas while he got on with other jobs.

The story I remember most clearly involved a local convict, whose escape is reported in the local paper. Our first-person hero and his friend do some research and decide to stake out the home of the convict’s aged mother. The convict catches our hero snooping around the house and takes him hostage at gunpoint, while the police, summoned by the friend, gather outside with loud hailers. There seems no way out of this impasse. Then the aged mother turns on the radio, and the newsreader reports that an escaped convict has captured the son of local builder Wilfrid Treasure.

‘You’re never Wilf Treasure’s son!’ the convict says. ‘Best boss I ever ‘ad, ‘e was. I was working on ‘is site, diggin’ the footin’s when they came to arrest me. Insisted on paying me out in full, your dad did, before ‘e’d let them take me away. ‘Ere, Ma, put the kettle on. I’m giving myself up.’

That’s the way I remember it, including the forest of apostrophes. I’ve no idea what Alf made of this crudely embedded commercial  for the family business. He gave me 15/20 and wrote: Implausible, but quite well written.

A new year revelation

As new year’s eve approaches I am moved to reflect on new years past. One I remember particularly I spent with my brother Patrick, sadly no longer living. I was 16. He had just finished his first term as a dental student at Guy’s Hospital. I’d hitched to London to visit him – 100 miles up the A40. It was a journey I was familiar with for other reasons – a girl I knew in Clapham – but that would be a different story. And unlike those other trips, which ended with me slipping back into the house in the small hours of a Sunday morning (unmissed, thanks to the random comings and goings of large-scale family life), this new year’s visit was probably made with the knowledge and consent of the parental authorities.

As midnight approached, Patrick and I were making our way down Charing Cross Road towards Trafalgar Square. Patrick had learned to play the trumpet but liked experimenting with other instruments. His favourite at that time was a baritone horn (an upright brass instrument like a small tuba) which he’d found in a junk shop. It was battered and tarnished and leaky around the valves, but he could knock a decent tune out of it. As we wove our way down the street, Patrick was blowing air into the horn to warm it up and working the keys with his fingers. Was he wearing fingerless mittens as I picture him? Quite possibly.

Suddenly we were confronted by a drunk, a wreck of a man, his bloated drinker’s face sallow under the streetlights. He pointed an uncertain finger at the horn and said, ‘Bet I could get a better sound out of that thing than you.’ He wasn’t quite steady on his feet, and it had been a struggle for him to get that sentence out, so Patrick must have reckoned he was safe. Since he was holding the instrument, he went first. A small crowd gathered. I fancy he played Auld lang syne, but I might have imagined that detail, or imported it from another memory. When he’d finished there was applause and some raucous cheers, and Patrick handed the horn over.

Cradling the instrument, which looked smaller in his arms, the drunk reached deep into the pocket of his rumpled mac. I thought it was a handkerchief he was after – he could have used one. What he pulled out was a mouthpiece. That’s when I began to think we might be in trouble. He removed the mouthpiece from the horn, passed it to Patrick and fixed his own in place. He played Abide with me and gave that thing the kiss of life. The crowd where we stood fell silent. I’d never imagined such a sound could come out of such a ruin – the horn or the man.   

Mislaid in translation

In Windows on the World, a novel by Frédérick Beigbeder (published in French in 2003 and in English translation by Frank Wynne the following year), the narrator reluctantly joins a demonstration in Paris against the Iraq war. Agonising over how the West should respond to the attack on the Twin Towers, he asks himself, ‘Am I a coward, an appeaser, an anti-Semite, a cheese-eating surrender monkey, as the American newspapers say?’

The phrase ‘cheese-eating surrender monkey’ originated on The Simpsons as a parody of Bush era Anti-French prejudice before it was taken up and stripped of irony by rightwing American commentators. I was startled to find it in a French novel and curious to know what it looked like in the original. Had Beigbeder translated it from Simpsonese only for Wynne to translate it back again? So I got hold of a copy. I was surprised to discover that the American phrase stood in place of a single word – pétainiste.

In cutting this reference to Marshal Pétain, who led the Vichy government and collaborated with the Nazis, and replacing it with a joke off The Simpsons, Wynne made the text more accessible, I suppose – at least in the short term, until surrender monkeys chatter off into obscurity. But he sacrificed the historical resonance of Beigbeder’s soul-searching.

I can’t help thinking that an English-language novelist attempting to capture the French experience, would be more likely to opt for Pétain. The novelist is focused on evoking the strangeness of the other place. The conscientious translator  presumably finds satisfaction in substituting the familiar. Nobody could accuse Wynne of shirking his duty. But sometimes, with translation as with other things, less is more.

Opening at random my copy of A Farewell to Arms, a novel set in First World War Italy, I find this conversation among members of the army ambulance corps about the families of deserters:

‘They are all without law to protect them. Anybody can take their property.’

‘If it wasn’t that that happens to their families, nobody would go to the attack.’

‘Yes. Alpini would. These V.E. soldiers would. Some bersaglieri.’

‘Bersaglieri have run too. Now they try to forget it.’

I’m guessing that when I first read this I had no idea who the bersaglieri were, other than a branch of the army reputed to be less courageous than the alpini, whoever they were – alpine types? So I knew quite a lot actually. Enough to follow the conversation, anyway. Hemingway might have called them the light infantry and the mountain soldiers. And I would have gained some factual information, but I would have lost some of the illusion of listening in.

The protagonist of Tahmima Anam’s novel The Good Muslim, set in 1980s Bangladesh, rescues her nephew Zaid from an oppressive Madrasa. She puts him on a boat while he talks compulsively about what he’s been taught.

Maya pleads with Zaid to eat something. He refuses, gazing through the thin bamboo netting arches over the boat, his eyes searching for the night sky. I know the Arabic alphabet, he repeats. Where is my mother? She isn’t here, Maya tells him, you know that. Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Raheem, he begins, reciting the words he has been taught. Nauzubillah hira-shahitan-ir-Raheem. A small lizard has made its way on board, and scuttles back and forth among the curved roof slats. He settles for this, chasing it with his finger.

Zaid says two things in Arabic. I quickly find a translation on the internet for the first of them. For now, the second eludes me. But the meaning isn’t so important. It’s their dramatic significance that matters – fragments of rote learning to which Zaid clings in his anxiety. And the language is part of the soundscape, which takes its place in the scene alongside the bamboo netting and the lizard and the night sky. 

Squeezing the giant's heart

There’s a Norse folk tale I remember from childhood involving a giant who hides his heart. The hero has to find the heart, so that he can save his brothers who have been turned to stone by the giant, and rescue the beautiful princess the giant has imprisoned. The princess’s job is to find out where the giant keeps his heart. 

It’s a bit like Delilah getting Samson to reveal the secret of his strength, except the secret in this case is more complicated. The heart, apparently, is on an island, in a church, in a well, inside the body of a duck, enclosed in an egg. Helped by creatures he has helped earlier in his travels, the hero eventually gets his hands on the egg and starts squeezing. He promises to save the giant’s life if he will free the princess and liberate his brothers from their petrified state. In the more authentic versions of the story, once all this is done the hero immediately ignores his promise and crushes the egg.

It occurs to me now that this tale of torture and retribution is the archetype of all those ticking bomb scenarios envisaged in dramas such as 24. To free the hostages, some heart has always got to be squeezed. And if you’ve got a problem with that, get over it – you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

But specifically what put the story in my mind was the latest episode of Homeland. For those who don’t know, this is an America drama about a US marine called Sgt Brody, who is released after eight years of captivity in Iraq. It turns out that during these lost years his captor and sometime torturer, Abu Nazir, befriended him and converted him both to Islam and to the Islamist cause.

We’ve seen Brody on the brink of detonating a suicide bomb. And we’ve watched him being co-opted by the CIA having been seduced (on more than one level) by an agent. Whose side he’s on now is anybody’s guess. Which I suppose is what makes us watch – those of us who do. To be honest, none of it makes any sense if you think too hard about it, but demanding hard thought is not its purpose.

Clearly Abu Nazir is a bad guy, but he’s well matched by the odious Vice President who represents all that’s most callous about Washington politics and the American imperial machine and is, from Abu Nazir’s perspective, a war criminal. And in the climax of the latest episode, Nazir gets to squeeze the VP's heart. It isn’t hidden in a duck’s egg, but on a laptop, because the VP, it turns out, has a pacemaker. Brody, all-American hero and establishment protégé and therefore uniquely placed to play the role of princess, texts the serial number from the VP’s office, thus handing control of the VP’s heart to Abu Nazir’s geeks. The VP shows up just in time to have a heart attack in Brody’s arms.  

We’re used to mythic themes being reimagined in the light of technological advances. Science fiction does this all the time. Huxley’s Brave New World is, among other things, about the ancient dream of eternal youth and its limitations. The crew in Danny Boyle's film Sunshine fly too close to the sun. Philip K Dick’s story ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ (adapted for the screen as Blade Runner) is a version of the Pygmalion myth. But this is the first time I’ve encountered the heart-squeezing trope given the pseudo-scientific treatment. 

Dickens and the Time Lords

I find myself thinking of a good plot as a kind of TARDIS. Partly because it’s a vehicle for time travel, but mainly because the inside is bigger than the outside. There’s no mystery about how to get in – the doorway’s staring you in the face – but it leads to something unexpectedly capacious.

Five people on a daytrip to Margate to scatter a dead friend’s ashes in the sea. That’s the neat exterior of Graham Swift’s Last Orders. You can walk all round it and take in its scope at a glance. But open the door and you get all these entangled life stories, decades of love and conflict and betrayal. Time travel is crucial in this case, but just as important is the capacity of the plot to open up and lead you in many directions without just sprawling shapelessly.

I realise this TARDIS image might have a potency for me that not everyone can relate to. I can’t say where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated, but I know that the following evening I was glued to the first ever episode of Dr Who. I think it was mainly exposition – no Daleks – but something gripped the childish imagination. Two schoolteachers follow one of their students home, a strange girl who is causing them concern, and they watch her walk onto a piece of waste ground and slip inside a police box. I remember their amazement when they followed her through the door and saw the style in which she and the Doctor were living (the white-haired William Hartnell, of course, before Who went hip).

I was hooked for a year or two. Then I probably just grew out of it. But I may have sensed that the plot was destined to be a sprawling mess because it lacked the most basic element, which is an ending. You can wander limitlessly inside, but there’s no outside to contain the journey.

I've just seen the new film of Great Expectations. I particularly enjoyed the young gentlemen Pip mingles with when he comes into his money. Those drunken dinners with the Finches of the Grove reminded me of the Bullingdon Club where I used to hang out with Dave and Boris in my student days (not actually). Dickens’ plot, necessarily stripped of peripheral material, shines through. The twists, revelations and reversals that punctuate Pip’s life provide the containing structure. What opens up inside is the whole of society from its wealthiest heirs to its most abject criminals and the secret networks of personal relationships, financial interests, and moral responsibilities that bind them together.  

In defence of blogging

Over the past few months, as I’ve let people know about this blog, a few of my older friends have expressed unease – they don’t get what blogging is for. One wonders why I don’t just write a journal and keep it to myself. Another struggles with a sense of disapproval that he can’t quite put his finger on.

When I moved to Los Angeles 12 years ago, I started writing an annual letter home, which I’d photocopy and mail to friends and family. A quaint process it seems now, but not so obviously antiquated back then at the turn of the century. Not everybody liked it. Rumours reached me of two separate recipients refusing to read it. One, I was informed (whether reliably or not, I couldn’t say), used to toss it in the bin unread. The other annually rejected his wife’s offers to read bits of it aloud (I like to imagine him sticking his fingers in his ears and humming). I half understood these reactions. I assumed they were rooted in a feeling that a duplicated letter is somehow fraudulent. What friends write to each other should be personal and spontaneous.

In an essay on the wonderful letters of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, Tom Paulin writes about this expectation: “Are letters not written… as throwaway, disposable, flimsy unique holographs which aim to flower once and once only in the recipient’s reading and then disappear immediately? The merest suspicion that the writer is aiming beyond the addressee… freezes a letter’s immediacy and destroys its spirit” (Tom Paulin, Writing to the Moment, Faber 1996, p. 216).

Perhaps the discomfort with blogging is related to this. Perhaps it’s an expression of the more general sense that the proper barriers between the private and the public spheres have been eroded. In Malcolm Bradbury’s 1972 novel The History Man, the radical sociologist Howard Kirk is writing a book called The Defeat of Privacy which anticipates this trend. He says, “It’s about the fact that there are no more private selves, no more private corners in society… There are no concealments any longer, no mysterious dark places of the soul. We’re all there in front of the entire audience of the universe in a state of exposure.” What seemed radical thinking in the 1970s – utopian or nightmarish according to your point of view – now sounds like an ordinary day in the world of Facebook and Twitter.

In fact, with lots of people updating their status hourly, the weekly composing of a blog post seems, in comparison, positively sedate, even old-fashioned. The technology would have been unimaginable to an Elizabethan pamphleteer or an eighteenth century essayist, but the impulse to develop a thought in public would surely have been recognised. I grew up, before the invention of the internet, with people who were forever firing off letters to the local newspaper, or the town council, or haranguing whoever would listen on whatever seemed important to them at the time.  

I’m not unsympathetic to the anti-blog arguments, starting with the fact that there are probably more people writing them than reading them. On the other hand, here are five things a blog won’t do:

Create litter.

Trap you in a corner at a party.

Interrupt your evening with a loud ringing noise.

Stop you from sleeping on the train.

Drive you from the dinner table in tears.