Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown's at it again: another book that will have to do with religion and mysteries surrounding it, problems to be solved and, of course, in writing the book, a heap of money to be made.
Best of luck to him I say.
Many others seem to resent his success pointing to his dreadful style. Not literature, old boy.
John Humphreys of Radio 4's Today fame had a go at him: "the literary equivalent of painting by numbers by an artist who can't even stay within the lines." And, naturally, Salmon Rushdie has put his two well shod boots in: "a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name."
I liked "The Da Vinci" code. But there, I'm someone who finds it difficult to get through two or three pages of any Ian Macewan novel.
What the novel has got, if it is without literary distinction or even merit at all, is speed; it's a real page-turner. And with page-turners you don't, in a sense, actually read them - you speed read them. You're not interested in and certainly not aware of any literary content - only the speed of the action is what you're after.
Probably the trouble with it getting such a bad press is that it is pretentious, or seems so: maybe Dan Brown wants to be taken seriously as a novelist and so the story is over complex, with people trying to solve problems which, because of their nature (religious stuff), have the veneer of something to be taken seriously.
I enjoyed the film too (except for the part with Ian Macellan in).
So here's looking forward to the new novel and, later no doubt, the 700 million dollar grossing film. With Tom Hanks.

War

Andrew Roberts has written a history of the second world war and from the reviews it's getting it looks like it's a good read. It doesn't break new ground - so many books about WW2 have been written that it must be difficult for a historian to find something new to say; but Roberts writes so well that whatever he sets his sights on becomes an exciting read. Not only that but he writes from a certain perspective which I think is "from the right" so that he is not only thorough but positive in his judgements; you may not agree with some of them but you can't help but take notice of them and admire the way he presents them.
Paul Johnson wrote a review of this book, "The Storm of War: a New History of The Second World War", and praised it highly. But at the end of the review he wrote: "Roberts's book is a powerful, well-documented sermon on these inhumanities. Engrossing to read. But will it do any good?"
I don't believe it will. I am not thinking of what Henry Ford said of history - "history is bunk" -I'm thinking that so much has already been written about war in general, so many plays and films and novels have been written about war, especially WW2, and many of them positively against it, yet nothing much has happened to cause people to take heed before embarking on yet another war. Alastair Cook, I recall, in his Letters from America, some time back said something to the effect that after WW2 the United Nations was set up with its purpose to prevent other wars occurring, but he went on to say that (then, 10 or 20 years ago) there had been over 200 conflicts in the world since then, some minor conflicts but most full-scale wars.
I recall a war play on TV some years back being discussed by a panel of critics on radio, and I remember one of the panel saying "they keep writing these plays damning war but no one seems to take any notice of them, they carry on fighting."
Will it do any good? I'm afraid not. But don't ask me what will.

Music Critics

One of the best music critics was Neville Cardus (who also wrote well about cricket). I am reading a book called "Conversations with Cardus", a fascinating read in which he covers his own work with The Manchester Guardian (as it then was) and The Sunday Times and other newspapers and journals, as well as mention other music critics of whom he was fond or whom he admired: Shaw, Ernest Newman, Beerbohm and particularly Samuel Langford (of whom I had never heard). What struck me most about these music critics (and others I have read) is that they all seem to have aversions, "blind spots", over one or a few composers. Ernest Newman for example did not much like Mozart; Cardus is quite amazed at Newman's tendency to boost the reputations of quite ordinary composers - Bantock for example. Newman once wrote that Bantock's "Omar Khayyam" could be "mentioned in the same breath as the B Minor Mass of Bach". Cardus just couldn't believe that his usually discerning friend could be so blinkered.
Cardus himself hated "progressive" music. He thought it an artistic reflection of a materialistic society. "Some aspects of this 'progress' are destructive to the human spirit and many avante garde composers are expressing these aspects in their music..... within 50 years there will be a series of reactions against the more ridiculous concepts of life today."
Bernard Shaw disliked Brahms, certainly despising his first symphony and saying about a mass he wrote that there are certain experiences in life one does not want to repeat and that applies to listening again to Brahms's mass - or words to that effect.
I can't get close to liking Mahler. I admire him but I can't enjoy him. He doesn't seem to have any of the joy of..... wait fior it..... Mozart.
I don't know how Ernest Newman felt about Mahler but he was very enthusiastic about "the greatest English songwriter" Frederick Nichols.
Who's he for heaven's sake? Not even Cardus had heard of him.

Love stories

When I was tutoring a class of creative writers I met two very old ladies who each told me a love story that, they said, was true. I had no reason to disbelieve them for they were delightful, honest human beings one of whom was from Ireland, the other was local Welsh.
The Irish woman told me a story that had the famous writer Frank O'Conner as the main character. He fell in love with a married woman whose husband was a military officer. She left her husband to go and live with O'Conner. They lived together for some time until Frank O'Conner died. Soon after, the woman's husband asked her to come back to him. She did and they continued living together as man and wife.
The other lady had been a nanny to a rich family in South Wales. One of the daughters of the family fell in love with one of the "cow men" (she used this expression if memory serves me right). The family instantly dismissed him and he went to work elsewhere. They forbad her to have anything more to do with him but she followed him, married him and they lived happily together. Of course, the family would have nothing to do with her after that. But the woman who told me the story said that she often visited them at their small holding. She told me they were very happily married with a few children.

Odds On

William Rees-Mogg writing in The Times recently tipped Lord Mandelson to be the next leader of the Labour party with, at his heels, Harriet Harmon making good running. Give me a break please Rees-Mogg - Mandelson leader with Harmon his deputy, or vice versa?..... the mind boggles.
I would like to know what the odds are on these two in the betting market. Now that Rees-Mogg has tipped them then maybe the odds will suddenly have risen; but as the time draws nearer when decisions have to be made by the National Executive or whoever, my bet is that they won't, either of them, be in the running.
Remember some time back when Margaret Thatcher was PM and people were speculating on a change up top? Who then was odds-on favourite? No, you can't remember because he has pretty well disappeared without trace; so I shall tell you: Kenneth Baker. Remember him?
He was tipped for the top but somehow I knew that he didn't have a snowballs. He was too decent, too nice, too much the intellectual. So he went - to the Lords.
But I must say that Kenneth Baker was responsible for introducing a bill that had the most far reaching effects on social life: the Dog Act. Now many people said it wouldn't work; others said it was a disgrace, an assault on the right of dogs to do whatever dogs do - like bite and shit and bark and kill little babies. I thought, and still think, that it was one of the best acts passed through parliament that have taken place in the past 50 or so years.
So, cheers to Kenneth Baker for that and though he is virtually forgotten he will always be remembered by me as a man who did the right thing - though it wasn't the most popular thing and maybe that's what eventually wrecked his ambition. If he really had any.
Mandelson, leader of the Labour Party? Don't make me laugh. Why not Elton John?

Bats

In the article on Low Life in The Spectator this week Jeremy Clarke describes how a friend of his, villains on his tail bent of breaking his legs for grassing on them, says he's having to sleep with a bat in his room, which Clarke interprets as a living creature but which is in fact a baseball bat, for protection.
Bats can fly into rooms as I once found at a weekend course of writers when a lady returned to her room for the night to find a bat there. She screamed and people rushed to see what was going on. One brave gentleman somehow got it out the window but not before a rather strange lady on the course (we had a lot of those by the way) said "I must see it. A bat! How lovely!" She was too late and, of course, she was very disappointed.
She was the one who said that a friend of mine had "no aura". I never knew what she meant but, looking at him, I had an inkling: a sort of dry look about him.
I was once in a hut full of young men, mainly students, in France; we were all working there for the summer, not paid much, but we had keep - which is when I learned to drink a lot of red wine and smoke Gauloise cigarettes. It was one of those hair-brained schemes governments developed after the war to "get the nations together" or some such thing. Well, every night someone would, due to the heat, open doors at both ends of the hut and then we'd watch the bats, heaps of them, coming like racing cars through the building, brilliantly avoiding the vertical posts that held the roof up. Quite a sight. No one was afraid. No one had a beehive haircut for the bats to get tangled in (old wives tale). You went to sleep and didn't worry that your blood would be sucked in the night - like the young man in.... what was it?.... "Coral Island?".

Walford Davies

I typed Walford Davies into "youtube" to find that there are on the first page only two versions of his most famous work, "Solemn Melody". They always played it at the remembrance service but the trouble was that when you turned on the TV to watch, Richard Dimbleby would speak over it in his solemn tones. The full army band playing it is wonderful, gives it the depth of feeling it needs for the occasion; the two versions on "youtube" are not so good: the first is fine though - Julian Lloyd Webber with the orchestra of St Martins in the Field, very moving and "English" - and the second is good in its way - an organ version, loud and lacking in feeling. Give me the brass band version every time.
When my father was a young man in the 1920's he was a member of the Workers Education Association (WEA) in Blackwood; they used to have guest speakers at some meetings and one of these, he told me, was Walford Davies. Probably he was then a professor of music at Aberystwyth University. He used to get to Blackwood by train from Newport. When he got to the meeting he would speak first of the beauty of the Welsh valley he had just travelled up and of how he could understand how music was so important to Welsh people and how well they performed it in the light of the beauty of their landscape. (Not like Sir Thomas Beecham who, later, after WW2, said that "there is no music in Wales" which caused a bit of a furore in the press).
Another speaker at the WEA meetings was the poet Walter de la Mere. My father spoke proudly of how he had shaken his hand.
Who reads him now?

THE MOTH.
"Isled in the midnight air,
Musked with the dark's faint bloom,
Out into glooming and secret haunts
The flame cries, "Come!"