Battered Kingdom

Margaret Gaskin: Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940

The New York Sun: January 3, 2007

If, in 1932, nearly 15 years after the catastrophe of the "war to end all wars" had finally drawn to a close, any Britons were still foolish, complacent, or naïve enough to cling to their island nation's traditional sense of inviolability, Stanley Baldwin, the country's once-and-future prime minister, wanted to smash that illusion beyond repair. Speaking to the House of Commons in November of that year, he warned that the "man in the street [had] to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through."

And so, less than a decade later, the bomber did. Impatient with Germany's defeat (or, more accurately, failure to prevail) in the Battle of Britain, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to turn its attention from the few to the many. The duels in the sky during that lonely, legendary, dangerous summer of 1940, almost archaic in their occasional chivalry, were to be replaced by the more typically 20th-century spectacle of fire, ruin, and indiscriminate slaughter. The systematic assault on Britain's cities, then described and now remembered as "the Blitz," began in early September 1940. By the time the worst of it was over, roughly nine months later, nearly 45,000 were dead, with, perhaps, an additional 70,000 seriously injured. The horrors of the V-1 and V-2 attacks on an exhausted England (close to 10,000 killed) toward the end of the war were, of course, yet to come.

In writing "Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940" (Harcourt, 448 pages, $27), Margaret Gaskin has essentially attempted to tell the story of the Blitz through the events of a single night that saw the largest air raid on London up to that point. It was a 100-bomber onslaught that set off a firestorm designed to reduce the British capital's historic core, the City, to nothing more than rubble. Sadly, despite a careful, and often striking, selection of reminiscences and contemporary accounts (so far as it goes, the book is very well researched) that are often as moving as they are vivid, Ms. Gaskin's overall narrative fails to convince. To use a possibly unfortunate word, her "Blitz" is something of a dud.

In part that's due to a prose style that is sometimes orotund ("A lifetime in the hurly-burly of the public presses had honed the robust tongue in which [Winston Churchill rallied] his London tribe, his British tribe, his tribe of ‘English-speaking peoples'") or shopworn (Hitler's Berchtesgaden is, wait for it, a "spectacular mountain fastness"). But more troubling still is that the author simultaneously manages to cram in and leave out too much information. Readers will have to wade through (a surely unnecessary) World War II 101 ("As Hitler's master manipulator of truth, Goebbels took considerable personal pride in what his Führer saw when he looked at his beloved maps at the end of 1940"), but are deprived of many more directly relevant details surrounding the Blitz that could have put the events Ms. Gaskin is trying to relate into better context.

We are, for example, told remarkably little about the planning, events, and principal personalities on the German side and not much more about those organizing the defense of Churchill's battered kingdom. Nor is there a great deal of discussion about what the decision by Hitler to shift to a mass bombing offensive really meant. Destructive as the Blitz was undoubtedly to prove (oddly, Ms. Gaskin neglects to provide a full accounting of the toll) it was a sign that Berlin's hopes of a quick victory in the west had evaporated. Instead they were replaced by a strategy of attrition (according to Goebbels, some of the pilots involved saw it as an "aerial Verdun," a damning and telling phrase).

The chances that this would succeed, as the German leadership fully understood, were highly dependent on America's assistance to England being kept to a minimum (to be fair, Ms. Gaskin handles the increasing desperation of Britain's pleas to America very well). By leaving the aftermath of December 29 largely out of her book, however, Ms Gaskin makes it impossible to work out where that particular raid fitted into the broader history of the Blitz. Instead, she cuts to Winston Churchill's funeral a quarter of a century later, an epilogue to a drama seemingly without third, fourth, or fifth acts.

Indeed, with a death toll of roughly 200, the bombings of December 29 were far from being the most lethal of the Blitz. Far worse was to come the following year, culminating in the last great attack on May 10 that killed nearly 1,500. That said, the significance of the night Ms. Gaskin describes is that its blazing warehouses, doomed alleys, and tumbling buildings represented the death throes of the old City, the ancient, cluttered, rabbit-warren mercantile and commercial heart of the empire, the stamping ground of Dickens, Pepys, and Johnson. When, some 40 years later, I worked in that same area, the street names — Basinghall, Aldermanbury, Cheapside, Paternoster — may have been freighted with history, but all too often they were lined with nothing more than the drab concrete of utilitarian postwar construction.

And it's difficult not to think that alongside that old City there perished much of the moral restraint holding the British back from the idea — and the, possibly necessary, barbarism — of total war. Grasping this change, is, one would think, an essential element in understanding the meaning, and the consequences, of those months of destruction. Yet the only reference to this issue in Ms. Gaskin's text is a brief remark by Arthur Harris, the deputy chief of air staff. The Germans, he said, had "sown the wind." Indeed they had. Harris subsequently rose to head Britain's Bomber Command and, less than three years later, the firestorms of Operation Gomorrah had already devastated Hamburg. By the time the war ended, some 600,000 Germans had perished in Allied raids over the Reich.

Hitler had sown the wind and his people had reaped the whirlwind.

Logue’s Odyssey

The New Criterion, December 1, 2006

I was waiting to hear what the English poet Christopher Logue had done to the Iliad, and I was worried. The omens, threatening an evening of eat-your-greens earnestness, would have troubled the most phlegmatic of soothsayers. As for the theater in which I found myself, it was more depressing than Ford’s after Booth. A long way off Broadway in all but the most geographical sense, it was a hard-seat hall a few minutes’ walk from those now-vanished towers. The only thing emptier than the bleak, Beckett-bare stage was an auditorium begging for tumbleweed. We had been told that the entire cast (the performance was a dramatization of some of Logue’s verse) would number exactly three: three actresses, to be precise.

The plains of Troy. The end of a long siege. Great armies clash. Achilles. Ajax. Hector. New York City. Three girls. T-shirts. No armor. Not a chariot in sight. An evening, I thought, of modernist austerity, dreary iconoclasm, and banal feminist resentment loomed grimly ahead.

I was wrong. What followed was simply remarkable, an hour or so of extraordinary, compelling drama, beautifully played by the three actresses I had been too ready to malign in a work (produced by Verse Theatre Manhattan) that had the class—and the modesty—to allow Homer’s tale and Logue’s lyricism to weave their own enchantment. And so they did.

Here’s Achilles setting off to avenge Patroclus:

The chariot’s basket dips. The whip

Fires in between the horses’ ears.

And as in dreams, or at Cape Kennedy, they rise,

Slowly it seems, their chests like royals, yet

Behind them in a double plume the sand curls up,

Is barely dented by their flying hooves,

And wheels that barely touch the world,

And the wind slams shut behind him.

The reference to Cape Kennedy is characteristic of Logue’s “account” of the Iliad (he doesn’t pretend to understand classical Greek, and has never described what he is doing as translation), a rendering peppered with allusions to the millennia that have passed since Homer first told his story of bickering gods, warring men, and a doomed city. These references don’t jar; there’s nothing crass, no stretching to be hip about them. They remind us that some of the force of this epic derives from its own no less epic antiquity, and they do so sometimes obliquely, sometimes specifically: Achilles’s “helmet screams against the light;/ Scratches the eye; so violent it can be seen/ Across three thousand years.”

This playfulness with chronology extends to the way in which Logue shuffles Homer’s narrative, chopping here, adding there, and then (sometimes, it seems) simply throwing up the pieces into the air for the sheer fun of seeing where, and how, they land. In part, this reflects the way that Logue’s odyssey through the Iliad began back in 1959, with an invitation to contribute a passage to a new BBC version of Homer’s poem (a classier Maecenas then than now). This set in motion a process that led Logue to his Patrocleia (based on the Iliad’s sixteenth book) and Pax (inspired by the nineteenth). With those completed, Logue “realized that conflating Books 17 and 18 as GBH (Grievous Bodily Harm, an English legal term for serious forms of criminal assault) would allow me to try my hand at something new—600-odd lines devoted almost entirely to violent, mass action—which would unite Patrocleia and Pax.” Packaged together as War Music (1981), they did so triumphantly.

Naturally enough, this most cinematic (he has worked in the movies) and leisurely (it took ten years) of poets next offered up a prequel, Kings (1991), his account of the Iliad’s first two books. This was followed by The Husbands (1994) (Books 3 and 4), and, in 2003, All Day Permanent Red (the title is, typically for this magpie-writer, stolen from an advertisement for Revlon lipstick), a blood-drenched rewriting of Homer’s first battle scenes:

Slip into the fighting.

Into a low-sky site crammed with huge men,

Half-naked men, brave, loyal, fit, slab-sided men,

Men who came face to face with gods, who

spoke with gods,

Leaping onto each other like wolves

Screaming, kicking, slicing, hacking, ripping,

Thumping their chests:

  “I am full of the god!”

Blubbering with terror as they beg for their lives:

  “Laid his trunk open from shoulder to hip—

Like a beauty-queen’s sash.”

Falling falling

Top-slung steel chain-gates slumped onto concrete,

Pipko, Bluefisher, Chuckerbutty, Lox:

  “Left all he had to follow Greece.”

  “Left all he had to follow Troy.”

Clawing the ground calling out for their sons in revenge.

It’s easy to discern that this poet of war and heroism is also something of a pacifist. Logue may be a former soldier, but his military service culminated with a spell in a British army jail located, with vaguely appropriate panache, in a crusader castle in Palestine. Later, he was involved with the UK’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a prominent, mercifully ineffective organization that misunderstood the Cold War for decades, and probably still does.

Nowadays, Logue, a man who remains, I imagine, a creature of 1950s bohemia (Soho, Paris, knew Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller, was—as Count Palmiro Vicarion—a writer of pornography for Maurice Girodias, the mid-century’s most interesting publisher of naughty books), modestly and immodestly tells journalists that marching against nuclear weapons was a good way to pick up chicks.

The latest chapter in Logue’s Homeric saga is Cold Calls (2005), a work more subdued in tone than what preceded it. Thanks to its winning, to widespread surprise, Britain’s prestigious Whitbread Poetry Prize earlier this year, it has drawn more attention than anything he has written since War Music. Ironically, Cold Calls is far from the finest installment in Logue’s ongoing masterpiece. Like an Oscar given to one of Hollywood’s ancient, the award was probably a reward for longevity (Logue was born in 1926) as well as an admission that he should have received such recognition many years before.

This suspicion is only reinforced by the Whitbread judges’ comment that Logue had brought the Iliad “bang up to date.” Oh dear. They seem not to have noticed that there is nothing very much in that saga that needs renovation, a makeover, or a lick of fresh paint. As Logue himself has said, “It’s more modern than modern.” The Iliad is timeless. It always has been and, unless something very unexpected happens to human nature, it always will be. Four days after I saw that performance, those two towers were dust. The play was forced to close. When it re-opened, after a hiatus that only added to its force, American troops were in Afghanistan. Bang up to date? I think so.

If, in the end, Cold Calls disappoints, it is only slightly, and only when compared with some of the earlier volumes. Logue has set himself a high bar, and the piecemeal way in which his work appears does this latest chapter no favors. Within the context of his wider enterprise, Cold Calls is a success; it just has trouble standing alone in the spotlight. Scattered through its pages are hints that Prospero’s bag of tricks is emptying. The starburst similes are beginning to stale, talk, yet again, of the Russian Front is a little tired, old hat, old helmet.

But it’s too soon to write off the aged magician as he works away, chopping, changing, messing with, yet somehow never losing sight of his source. Cold Calls is billed as “War Music Continued,” yet by beginning with a long battle sequence rooted in the events of the Iliad’s fifth book, Logue abandons the nod to Homer’s narrative contained in War Music’s more or less sequential rendering of books 16 to 19. He then returns (briefly, sort of) to the chronological fold by using the Greek hero Diomed’s (Diomedes) impious attack on Aphrodite (Homer, book 5) as an introduction to a passage inspired by the episode (Homer, book 21) in which the river god Scamander battles Achilles. It’s neatly done, it’s characteristic of the way that Logue weaves his way through Homer, and it paves the way for yet more games with the Iliad’s original plot.

According to Homer, Scamander’s support for Troy was a matter of simple theopolitics. Fine, but a touch dull. Logue, still channeling Wardour Street, prefers something more seductive. Wounded by Diomed, the teary goddess of love (“her towel retained by nothing save herself”) makes her way to the river to ask for its water’s healing touch. Naughty Scamander (“astonished by his luck”) is only too pleased to help. When, after a sexy, bawdy, teasing, imploring exchange, that towel finally “goes curling off” into the flow (as we, and wicked Count Palmiro Vicarion, always understood it would), we know that the smitten Scamander will oblige his Aphrodite by sweeping the Greeks away. And so the river does:

Almost without a sound

Its murmuring radiance became

A dark, torrential surge

Clouded with boulders, crammed with trees,

         as clamorous as if it were a sea,

That lifted Greece, then pulled Greece down,

Cars gone, masks gone, gone under, reappearing, gone

That whole passage is, typically for Logue, of the Iliad, yet not in it.

The same, broadly speaking, is true of what follows a little later, a foul-mouthed slanging-match between Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite, each dressed like celebrity trash, and behaving not like the goddesses of Olympus, but its fishwives. It leaves an impression, coarse and more than a little grotesque, that doesn’t gel too well with the way that Logue has, in his earlier volumes, succeeded in conveying the beauty, power, willfulness, and menace of the gods, but the fault lies not with the Englishman, but (dare I say it) with the Greek. One of the more puzzling aspects of the Theomachy, the battle between the gods in Books 20 and 21, is the way that it begins in elemental grandeur but ends in a brawl and an exchange of insults, something that Homer presumably inserted as a respite, a moment of comic relief amid the relentless slaughter, Keystone muddled in with the carnage. Logue’s take, for all its faults, works a great deal better.

If, after this, the concluding sections of Cold Calls are mildly disappointing, it’s not so much for what they are as for what they might have been. In a book described as a continuation of War Music, Logue might have been expected to be building towards the death and desecration of Hector, the Iliad’s tragic climax and a subject worthy of his skills. Instead this volume, which ends with the delegation of the desperate Greek leaders visiting the sulking Achilles, turns out to be set much earlier in Homer’s narrative:

They find him, with guitar,

Singing of Gilgamesh.

“Take my hands. Here they are.”

You cannot take your eyes away from him.

His own so bright they slow you down.

His voice so low, and yet so clear.

You know that he is dangerous.

Patroclus has yet to die, let alone Hector.

Logue has said that Cold Calls is the penultimate chapter of his epic, and, judging by an interview he gave the London Independent last year, it appears that the last chapter (“this bit isn’t in the Iliad at all”) will not take readers much closer to the destruction of Priam’s noblest son. Instead, he is planning to describe an assault by the Trojans on the Greek camp that will, in the end, decide nothing.

In a way though, perhaps it’s fitting that he will leave this ancient, ageless cycle of revenge, glory, bravery, and violence, of Troy, Gilgamesh, and Stalingrad, uncompleted, still alive, still alluring, still with us:

And now the light of evening has begun

To shawl across the plain:

Blue gray, gold gray, blue gold,

Translucent nothingnesses

Readying our space,

Within the deep, unchanging sea of space,

For Hesper’s entrance, and the silver wrap.

Covered with blood, mostly their own,

Loyal to death, reckoning to die

Odysseus, Ajax, Diomed, 

Idomeneo, Nestor, Menelaos

And the King.

Scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr. Logue.

Look but Don't Touch

David Thomson: Nicole Kidman

The New York Sun, September 5, 2006

Right at the beginning of this mad, maddening, provocative, and sometimes beautifully written book, "Nicole Kidman" (Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $24.95), David Thomson admits that he "loves" Nicole Kidman, a confession that is both essential and superfluous. Skeptical as we all should be about long-distance psychoanalysis, Mr. Thomson's book is more love letter than biography, both a meditation on obsession and a monument to it. He writes:

There she is in profile, her right shoulder raised, her chin lowered … with just a flap of brown cloth covering her breasts and a considerable expanse of white skin … a white that has a streak of icy blue in it, a rare milky hue. ... It is the quality of flesh you find in Ireland still, and in religious paintings of the Renaissance, and it is a mysterious fusion of the spiritual and the erotic — as pale as Cranach.

To read those words is to feel a twinge of sympathy for poor Mrs. Thomson, a frisson of anxiety for pretty Nicole, and a moment of worry for President Bush — 25 years after John Hinckley, we all know that love letters to actresses can sometimes have alarming consequences. But it's too soon to call the FBI or issue a restraining order: Mr. Thomson stresses that his love for Ms. Kidman will endure only so long as they don't meet.

That may be just as well. When eventually they do make contact (mercifully, only by phone), Ms. Kidman comes across as "a languid, superior, but amused prefect who had called a naughty boy to her study to see what he had been up to," an image that conjures up a mixture of repression, guilt, and vaguely masochistic peculiarity that may strike some (if not me — I am, like Mr. Thomson, British-born) as very English. It is an image that is, he supposes, deliberate: "[S]he tries to be what you want her to be."

Mr. Thomson is simply (so to speak) projecting, but in doing so, he nicely illustrates one of his book's wider themes. Movies are collective fantasy, their stars empty vessels into which audiences pour their dreams, longings, and delusions, a role far more demanding than any performed up on that beguiling, gorgeous screen. When Mr. Thomson claims that his love would not survive a face-to-face with his "fragrant," "ripe," "sexy," "elegant," "hot," "glorious," "ravishing" heroine, we almost trust him: He understands the danger of letting reality collide with fantasy, and he believes that cinema celebrity turns its creatures into people incapable of normal interaction.

If you think all this might be way, way too much of a stretch, you may have a point. Sometimes a trip to the cinema is just popcorn and 90 minutes in the dark, sometimes stardom is just a job. Regardless, don't let that you put you off buying this book, which is a wild, berserk ride, swerving here, careering there, and narrowly missing the ditch on more occasions than I can count. But as with "The Whole Equation," Mr. Thomson's garrulous, insistent, and unashamedly eccentric history of Hollywood, it's well worth hanging on until the end. Author of the wonderful, essential, and captivating "Biographical Dictionary of Film," Mr. Thomson has a profound knowledge of the movies and a love for them that exceeds even his adoration of the goddess from Down Under. It's impossible to read " Nicole Kidman" (how he must revel in the fact that the two of them will be linked forever, if only bibliographically) without learning far more about film, and looking at film, than the notion of a work dedicated to the life and times of a "sexy beanpole" with "commas for breasts" would suggest.

With its odd mix of biography, sharp cultural commentary, acute film criticism, and not so concealed longing, " Nicole Kidman," as should be evident by now, is neither conventional showbiz bio, nor tabloid exposé. With the exception of one deliciously prurient detail about the filming of "Eyes Wide Shut," gossip-hounds will be disappointed. If its writer is occasionally pretentious (he is), immodest (all those pages where he suggests how scripts could have been improved), and too prone to drool over Nicole's "very lovely, supple body," it only adds to this book's ramshackle, discursive, opinionated, and besotted charm. Besides, even when spouting nonsense, Mr. Thomson is more informative and entertaining than most writers. Far removed from the arid monotony of film-school Bauhaus, the sparkling rococo of his prose is a joy to read.

Above all, don't miss his sly, clever summaries of Ms. Kidman's oeuvre, particularly of those shockers he believes to be unworthy of his muse's talents, such as "Malice," a fiasco he describes as ending up shipwrecked "on the wilder shores of denouement." That's a phrase so neat that I can even forgive Mr. Thomson for disclosing his dream of Nicole as Belle de Jour being toyed with by a Gestapo officer and an "elderly Chinaman."

But can Mrs. Thomson?

Euro Scare?

Claire Berlinski: Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too

National Review, May 8, 2006

There’s a bright, shining, merciful moment, right towards the end of this infuriating, odd, but occasionally perceptive polemic, when its author, Claire Berlinski, says what needs saying about the rancid and rabid anti-Americanism now disgracing Europe’s public discourse:

“[It] is a cultist system of faith, rather than a set of rational beliefs, and as such is impervious to revision upon confrontation with facts, logic, evidence, gestures of good will, public relations campaigns, or attempts on the part of the American secretary of state to be a better, more sensitive listener.”

Accurate enough, but her observation that there is nothing Americans can do to change this, “short of dying politely en masse,” suggests that Ms. Berlinski, a lively writer always happy to hype up the snark and the spark of her prose, is taking her readers not to France, or Germany, but to Planet Coulter. When, in another all-too-typical passage, Europe’s past is described as “one of nearly uninterrupted war and savagery,” it’s impossible to avoid thinking that while American anti-Europeanism is comparatively rare, given reason to flower — I note without further comment that Ms. Berlinski studied French literature at the Sorbonne — it can be just as irrational as the hatred for America stewing in the cafés of the Left Bank.

Oh, and while we’re on the topic, it may be quite true that Europe’s history is scarred by slaughter, but it’s quite false to suggest that this is something specific to that part of the world. Mass murder, butchery, invasion, and conquest are what humans do. All races. All cultures. Always have done. Always will do. Europe stands out only because of the extraordinary achievement that is the best of its civilization. It is not the corpses that surprise, but the contrasts: the juxtaposition of the charnel house and the cathedral, the victims trudging to the ovens to the sounds of an orchestra.

But this is not the sort of analysis you’ll find in Menace in Europe (lurid title, lurid book), a work dedicated to the wider, wilder, and highly marketable thesis of a possibly doomed, probably desperate, and certainly dangerous continent drifting into a gathering storm of economic failure, demographic crisis, and ethno-religious strife. Now, while Europe is undoubtedly facing (or, more accurately, failing to face) some very profound problems, it’s way too soon to be writing its obituaries. Claire Berlinski is careful to hedge her hints of apocalypse with caveats (“I do not prophesy the imminent demise of European democratic institutions, nor do I predict imminent catastrophe on European soil”), but there’s a clear sense that she, for one, is preparing for the funeral (“I don’t rule out these possibilities. . . . It is possible and reasonable to imagine a very ugly outcome”).

And, as has been the case with a number of other recent books on the Old World’s predicament (George Weigel’s The Cube and the Cathedral is a striking example), the logic of Berlinski’s thesis leads her to exaggeration. It has to, because the facts alone will not do the trick. So, for instance, it’s not enough for her to insinuate (with appropriate disclaimers) that the nastier ghosts of Europe’s past may be slouching towards rebirth, she also has to throw in the claim that “Europeans . . . sense in their lives a cultural, spiritual, and ideological void.” Good heavens (or not).

Certainly Europeans generally, and for excellent reasons, tend to be less optimistic than their counterparts across the Atlantic, but there’s no particular reason to think that (at least outside the more neurasthenic sections of the intelligentsia) they are wandering around their cities enveloped in black mists of angst, ennui, and existential despair. Quite how you measure a continent’s contentment, I do not know, but for what it’s worth, one recent (2004) Eurobarometer poll revealed that 85 percent of EU citizens were either fairly (54 percent) or very (31 percent) satisfied with their lives. Existence in a cultural, spiritual, and ideological void is not, it seems, quite as dreadful as some commentators appear to believe.

Far too often, Berlinski’s need to stick to her Chicken Little line forces her narrative in a direction that it should not take. A brutally effective demolition of French “peasant” leader José Bové (the clown who trashed a McDonald’s) dissipates into a discussion of the holy fools, cranks, fanatics, and zealots who have been bothering the continent for generations. It makes for some interesting history, but it’s irrelevant, and, if it is designed to demonstrate that susceptibility to psychopaths, charlatans, and madmen is (like war, genocide, and the rest of the rap sheet) a particularly European vice, it’s thoroughly misleading.

Similarly, the author passes over the opportunity to look at the (admittedly slim) prospects of a much-needed patriotic revival within Europe’s nations in favor of a lengthy and rather overwrought examination of the meaning of Rammstein, a popular German heavy-metal band that combines the style of Spinal Tap with the aesthetics of Albert Speer. Yes, this makes for good, alarming copy, and it’s a convenient device to bring up yet again the subject of that miserable Reich, but, in the end, Claire Berlinski’s horrified descriptions of leather, sleaze, bombast, and kitsch do little more than remind us that German rock is, like German cuisine, usually best avoided.

There are times too when she appears to have drunk too deeply of her own Kool-Aid. Suitably enough, given the doom and gloom that permeates this book, some of its strongest, and most convincing, sections relate to an area where some panic is indeed called for: Europe’s failure to integrate its growing Muslim minorities. It’s a problem that will only be made worse by additional inflows from the Islamic world, yet Berlinski’s overblown fears about the viability of an aging society mean that that mass immigration is, apparently, an “economic necessity.” (It’s anything but.) Equally, while she understands that the EU is no more than “a marriage of convenience” (a gross oversimplification, actually, but it will do), her nightmare vision of a feeble and feral continent leads her to describe this ill-starred union as “politically and economically imperative.” It is neither: It is, rather, both a symptom and a cause of Europe’s current impasse.

What makes Menace in Europe all the more frustrating is that, amidst the shouts of alarm, cries of disaster, and howls of invective, there are some very valuable insights, and, particularly in a sharp analysis of how Marseilles manages its multicultural population, some excellent reporting. In the end, however, they only compound the impression that this book is an opportunity missed.

How very European.

Quiet Hero

David Leavitt: The Man Who Knew Too Much

National Review, January 30, 2006

If you have ever needed reminding of a nation’s capacity for ingratitude, the story of Alan Turing ought to do the trick. And if you have never heard of Alan Turing, that only proves the point. Born in 1912 into the cheese-paring and snobbery of Britain’s colonial administrative class, Turing emerged from a traditionalist family and an old-school education with a wild, unorthodox mind, and a record of achievement that establishes him as one of the most important mathematicians of the last century.

In not much more than one astonishing decade, this extraordinary individual would not only play a critical part in paving the way for the development of the laptop on which I am now typing, but also, through his wartime code-breaking at Bletchley Park, help ensure that this article didn’t have to be written in German. His tragedy, and ours, was that there was too little in the way of an encore. Within a few years of his greatest triumphs, Turing was a convicted criminal, guilty of “gross indecency” with another man, an embarrassment, if not exactly an outcast. Not so long afterwards he was dead, a suicide at 41 with the help of an apple dipped in cyanide.

With the secrecy that surrounded Turing’s wartime activities now lifted, the essential facts of his life are well established and more than adequately covered in this new biography. After walking his readers briskly through the early years, David Leavitt presents them with the considerable challenge of Turing’s first major work, the catchily named “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (1937), a paper that was, in essence, the blueprint for the modern computer. “Computable Numbers” is, in Leavitt’s words, a “curious blend of humbly phrased, somewhat philosophical speculation and highly technical mathematics,” something, he concedes, that is “disconcerting” for the “general reader” (that’s you and me) since, invariably, easier passages “segue immediately into dense bogs of unfamiliar symbols, German and Greek letters, and binary numbers.”

Well, when it comes to navigating those “dense bogs,” Leavitt is, in keeping with one of the tasks of this biography (the book is part of Norton’s Great Discoveries series, designed “to tell the stories of crucial scientific breakthroughs”), a pretty good guide. As someone confused by an abacus and in awe of a pocket calculator, I admit that my knowledge of computing is, or was, practically zero. After a re-reading or two of the chapters devoted to Turing’s “universal machine” and its revolutionary implications, this level of understanding had been raised to somewhere between hazy and confused: no small achievement, and a tribute to Leavitt’s powers of explanation.

Leavitt is no less deft in describing Turing’s critical role in breaking the Germans’ Enigma codes. His writing leaves the mysteries of cryptanalysis less mysterious and, as a result, we can begin to grasp the remarkable intellectual feat involved in Turing’s penetration of the secrets of Hitler’s Reich. We’ll never know how many Allied lives were saved by “the Prof” and his work, or by how many years his effort shortened the war, but Churchill never doubted its importance. Turing and his team were, he wrote, to have “all they want.” And so they did. More material rewards were to prove elusive. Stinginess and secrecy meant that the only official recognition of Turing’s achievements was a bonus of a few hundred pounds and a rather minor medal. So far as is known, he never complained, and, to the end of his life, Turing kept the secrets of Bletchley Park to himself. He and his colleagues were, said Churchill, “the geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled.”

But there’s more to The Man Who Knew Too Much than formulae, ciphers, and the click-click-click of the device that savaged Enigma. While his efforts inevitably fall short of the portrait contained in Andrew Hodges’s groundbreaking, and epic, biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), Leavitt nevertheless succeeds in drawing a wonderfully vivid picture of his shy, dry, brilliant hero, an eccentric boffin with chaotic, shabby tailoring, uncertain hygiene, an unsettling resemblance to Rudolf Hess, and a yen for long-distance running.

What works less well is Leavitt’s tendency to treat Turing’s homosexuality as a lens through which his whole life must be seen, sometimes ridiculously so. Thus in discussing a later work, “Intelligent Machinery,” a paper focused, as its name would suggest, on the possibility of building a truly “intelligent” machine, Leavitt notes how Turing’s strategy of opening with a summary of the views of those who disagreed with him “foreshadows the gay rights manifestos of the 1950s and 1960s, which often used a rebuttal of traditional arguments against homosexuality as a frame for its defense” — a comparison that is both accurate and pointless. A little later, we find “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Turing’s “most famous and in many ways most perverse paper,” described as a stew of anxiety over gender and sexuality, a reading that might have surprised Turing, a man comfortable with his sexual identity in a way that was, as so often with him, years ahead of his time.

Perhaps this was inevitable. Norton boasts that Great Discoveries will feature “writers from diverse backgrounds.” It’s that dodgy word “diverse” that should set the alarm bells ringing and that explains, undoubtedly, why Professor Leavitt, who teaches creative writing and is best known for novels focused on homosexual themes (The Lost Language of Cranes, While England Sleeps, among others), was chosen to write the biography of a mathematician.

The result, ironically, of his approach is somehow to diminish the horror of the unjust laws that largely confined Turing’s sex life to an emotional wasteland punctuated by furtive fumblings and discreet trips abroad. Nobody will ever know why he chose to kill himself (there were clear signs that he was going mad), but it’s impossible to imagine that the ordeal of prosecution and the humiliation of punishment (in essence, chemical castration) did not play their disgraceful part. That is not enough for Leavitt, who dilutes tragedy with absurdity by suggesting that the way in which Turing (a somewhat obsessive fan of Disney’s Snow White) committed suicide was designed to deliver an erotically symbolic message: “In the fairy tale the apple into which Snow White bites doesn’t kill her. It puts her to sleep until the Prince wakes her up with a kiss.”

Oh please.

Wonkette Jumps the Snark

Ana Marie Cox: Dog Days

New York Sun, January 6, 2006

If you need any confirmation that the glum little town that passes for this nation's capital is hopelessly obsessed with itself, take a look at "Dog Days" (Riverhead Books, 288 pages, $23.95), the Washington frolic and first novel by Ana Marie Cox, the below-the-Beltway blogger better known as Wonkette.

To get the most out of this book, you need to know beforehand what Ms. Cox has been up to on her blog. Sleazy, sarcastic, funny, and salacious ("Politics for People With Dirty Minds"), Wonkette first began lurking around computer terminals back in January 2004, a remote era lost in blogging antiquity when Assad's goons were still hanging out in Lebanon, Jennifer was still hanging with Brad, and John Kerry had not yet been hung out to dry. Following hot, and not a little sweaty, in the wake of Gizmodo (gadgets), Gawker (gossip), and Fleshbot (porn),Wonkette became the latest in a stable of blogs set up by British entrepreneur Nick Denton, its shtick an oddball mess of politics, D.C. rumor, sex, and satire. Throw in the excitement of an election season, along with Ms. Cox's striking good looks, and it's no surprise Wonkette soon shone as a blogosphere star.

The site reached some kind of peak, or nadir (take your pick) in mid-2004 with the saga of naughty Jessica Cutler. She was the senatorial staffer who chronicled her exhausting, grubby - but sometimes financially rewarding - romantic adventures on a Web site,Washingtonienne.com. Wonkette catnip! Ms. Cutler lost her job, but won notoriety, a book contract, and a Playboy spread, and, as she did so, Wonkette reported the disgraceful details to an overexcited world. It was a perfect, if slutty, symbiosis: Wonkette helped make Ms. Cutler a celebrity, and Ms. Cutler attracted readers to Wonkette.

Since then, despite continued critical acclaim (winner of a 2005 "Bloggie" as "best political weblog!"), Wonkette has jumped the snark: Washingtonienne was a one-off, there's a while to go until the presidential election, and, worst of all, the anarchic spirit that characterizes Ms. Cox's blog at its best has all too often been drowned in dully predictable Democratic spin. Unfortunately, the same weakness sometimes surfaces in "Dog Days," a generally very funny book, where the feeblest jokes - more Carter, alas, than Carville - are those aimed at making fools of the Republicans, something the GOP is quite capable of doing for itself.

If nods to contemporary liberal orthodoxy are one problem with "Dog Days," a related flaw is the way in which Ms. Cox takes pains to observe other pieties of our prim and proper era. Given Wonkette's wicked reputation, "Dog Days" is a strangely moralistic tale that concludes (spoiler ahead, but the book's plot, loosely inspired by that loose Washingtonienne, really doesn't matter that much) with Melanie, its once-promising heroine, appearing to abandon adulterous sex and binge drinking in favor of a wholesome return to the Heartland.

As if that's not bleak enough, anyone so obsessive (yes, yes, I was) as to read this book's "acknowledgments" section will be shocked to stumble across the eat-your-greens, Jim Lehrer moment when its supposedly hard-boiled author takes the time to thank political campaign types "for working so hard for so little when so much was at stake. Campaigns can be foolish; what you're fighting for isn't. "Oh, please. Cynics, however, will note that, in exchange for a deal reportedly "in the mid-six figures," Ms. Cox will soon be quitting Wonkette to write what sounds like an eat-your-greens, Jim Lehrer book about the next generation of political activists. Maybe she just needs to ensure that some of them will actually be prepared to speak to her.

But if you're after filth unsoiled by repentance (and who isn't?), a better option is the bracing, brazen smut of Jessica Cutler's (fictionalized) account of her rise to infamy. With its hints of "Fanny Hill," "Heathers," and, so, so distantly, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," "The Washingtonienne" is a shamefully compelling read, its seamy attraction best understood, perhaps, as the literary equivalent of a lap-dance.

For all its crumpled sheets and dodgy assignations, "Dog Days" is something very different, even if we forget its sporadic descents into liberal jabber and Puritan guilt. At times it's as much a work of anthropology as of fiction. Ms. Cox cleverly, and entertainingly, dissects the workings of some of the capital's competing power brokers, hustlers, losers, and drones. And if the detail can occasionally be too much (believe me, it can), it will doubtless delight all those on the Potomac who like nothing better than reading about themselves. Adding to their insider fun, the book is peopled by more lightly disguised D.C. personalities than an Abramoff indictment, but, even if the rest of us won't catch all the references, there's plenty here to enjoy.

As for the story's flow, it is what it is: pleasantly readable, frequently implausible, and enough to lure the reader on to the next page. More important, despite managing to confine her own role (as the "blogger girl") in her own book to a modest minimum, an unusual achievement in any volume coming out of Washington, Ms. Cox also pulls off the trick, rare in a comic work of this nature, of bringing a number of her principal players to life. Melanie, an aide to a stiff, awkward presidential candidate with a suspicious resemblance to John Kerry ("He looks human!" someone had exclaimed. Kind of a low bar, Melanie had thought ... "), and her co-conspirator, Julie, a political consultant of some kind, are believable both as individuals and representatives of a type. Meanwhile, the wanton waitress who poses as the skanky, scandalous blogger "Capitolette" is enough of a character to be performed by Marilyn Monroe at her best, or Jessica Simpson at her worst.

But the greatest pleasures of "Dog Days" are the laugh-out-loud insults, terrific jokes, splendid one-liners, brutal asides, and unkind descriptions that reveal the telegram talents of a blogger in top form. Sure, it's an uneven read, but who could fail to be charmed by the cheerful tastelessness of a novel that describes the mating rituals in a city where "standards of attractiveness ... tracked to availability and not physical beauty" as being "like the Special Olympics of sex ... everyone's a winner!"

Jessica Cutler, that's who. On her (new) Web site, she has written that she did not "love" the book "as much as I thought I would."

Oh well.

Incendiary Device

Chris Cleave: Incendiary

National Review Online, September 15, 2005

To British author Chris Cleave, it must have seemed like a dream come true. The rights to Incendiary, his first book, had been snapped up, an unusually large print-run had been prepared, and an extensive promotional campaign was in the works. In a sign of a best-seller to come, glossy posters advertising Incendiary were already up on the walls of London's subway system designed to entice commuters into buying what many thought would be the summer's big read.

And then, on the very day that Cleave's book was released, everything went horribly, tragically wrong. His dream, in a sense, became real, and, for some of those commuters, it became a nightmare, too. They were never to read that book. Their fate was to experience it. Incendiary, you see, is about a suicide-bomb attack on the British capital. The circumstances are different (the bombs are detonated at a soccer game) from what actually happened that terrible morning this July, but the results were very much the same. Read the way in which Cleave's heroine, a working-class woman from the East End of London (thus the ropey grammar), describes the survivors emerging from the massacre that has consumed her husband and her son: "Their eyes were wide and glassy and quite often they stumbled but they never blinked. There must of been hundreds of them shuffling out of the smoke. All of them with their eyes huge and wide like things pulled up from very deep in the sea."

It was pretty much that way in London on July 7, 2005, the day that Cleave's book came out.

In the wake of the Tube and bus bombings, the promotional campaign was largely abandoned, and the posters were taken down. They had shown smoke rising above the skyline and the question, "What if?" London now knew. Fifty-six were dead, hundreds more had been injured. When a few advertisements for Incendiary still appeared in the press (the publications in which they appeared had already gone to print) there were public apologies, and while the novel did not disappear from the shelves (I bought my copy in a shop on London's Victoria Street in early August), it tended to be tucked away in a discreet corner, perhaps with the latest installment of Jeffrey Archer's prison diaries or other embarrassments.

As for its author, judging by recent interviews, he remains appalled by the "sick coincidence" for which his book will always be remembered. "I wrote about something that could happen, and then it did happen," he told the Washington Post, and now I feel that I'm fundamentally tied, probably for the rest of my life, to those events." Even if Cleave occasionally sounds as if he has forgotten that there were others who have suffered far more because of those "events", he's probably right. Still, he should not complain too much. Incendiary was partially inspired by the Madrid bombings and the book's London editor has recalled how the editing process was rushed through before London itself fell victim to an attack.

But even if it's somewhat unseemly for Cleave to grumble about the London bombers' inconvenient timing, the wider accusation against his novel, that it was a crass exploitation of a tragedy that was bound to happen (and had indeed already done so elsewhere) is unfair. The struggle against Islamic extremism is likely to be one of the defining characteristics of this new century. Novelists should not be expected either to ignore it or to treat it only with the softest of kid gloves.

Judging by the response of some critics, it seems, however, that they are. Writing in the New York Times, the perpetually aggrieved Michiko Kakutani was outraged by Incendiary's very structure. The entire novel takes the form of an extended letter to Osama bin Laden from that shattered, grieving East End mother, and to Kakutani the fact it "begins with the words "Dear Osama" and ends with its heroine imploring the Qaeda leader to leave his cave and move in with her" is "simple tastelessness." But that's only true if we succumb to the mistaken desire to make a fetish out of bin Laden, a man who needs, very badly, to be cut down to size, both for our sanity and that of those lunatic enough to idolize him. Bin Laden is a man, nothing more, a murderous crackpot who richly deserves to be the subject of satire and the grim graveyard humor that is so much a feature of Incendiary. It's worth noting too that by the time of the invitation to bin Laden, Cleave's narrator is delusional, exhausted and broken. She just wants bin Laden to stop what he's doing and if that means he has to move in with her, so be it.

Others have faulted Incendiary for excessive bloodiness, but while it is true that the book does occasionally descend into Grand Guignol (and loses some force because of it), Cleave's determination to describe the details of the carnage is an essential corrective to our tendency to gloss over exactly what it is that our enemies want to do to us. In a society so unwilling to deal with reality that we limit the amount of times that images of planes crashing into the World Trade Center (let alone the dismaying, repulsive aftermath) are broadcast, Cleave's visions of horror are a useful antidote against complacency.

Unfortunately, Cleave himself sometimes seems tempted by a close relative of that complacency, the guilt-ridden and absurd idea that we in the West have brought the current troubles upon ourselves—perhaps, even, that we had it coming. There are suggestions of this throughout Incendiary, and they are exacerbated by the way in which Cleave imagines the official response to the suicide attacks in the soccer stadium. While some of his touches are deft (the return of barrage balloons, nauseatingly rechristened "shields of hope," to the London sky for the first time since the Blitz, each one, grotesquely, decorated with a picture of a bombing victim), others only demonstrate the belief in Western viciousness and ubiquitous, sinister conspiracy that is all too common among the chattering classes on both sides of the Atlantic. So, for example, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that when it comes to the suicide bombings, the British government has some dark secrets of its own to hide. Meanwhile the U.K. is shown lurching away from liberty and towards the persecution of its Muslim minority, a malevolent fantasy that has been shown up for the nonsense it is by Tony Blair's stumbling and hesitant response to the slaughter on July 7.

To write this way is to reveal intellectual frivolity in the face of real danger, something that is reinforced by the way in which Cleave allows the tired irrelevancies of Britain's dreary class warfare (the novel's bourgeois protagonists are uniformly venal, snobbish, and, well, you know the script) to share center stage with terrorist mass murder. It's a mark of how low matters have sunk in Britain that even in this respect Cleave is not, alas, alone. In the immediate aftermath of the July 7 attacks the leftist mayor of London, the oddball and unpleasant Ken Livingstone, noted that the terrorists had picked on "working-class" Londoners, a peculiar, and not particularly accurate, comment that made some jaundiced Brits wonder if the mayor would have been less upset if a prominent investment banker or two had been included amongst the dead.

Perhaps Cleave's problem was that, imagination exhausted, he simply had to fall back on the prejudices of contemporary "progressive" orthodoxy. Judging by Incendiary there's plenty of evidence to suggest that its author did indeed run out of ideas. The later part of the novel degenerates into soap opera and is really not worth reading. But this should not detract from the substantial achievement of the first 60 pages or so in which Cleave uses the (famously difficult) epistolatory format to give us a remarkable portrait both of his heroine and of the terrible events that so haunted her:

And the question that will haunt his readers is not "what if?" but "where next?"

Potter's Field

Charlie Higson: Silverfin

The New York Sun, May 20, 2015

With Clint Eastwood reduced to making films about ladies who box, Bond, James Bond, is the last true man's man. He blows smoke in the face of surgeons-general, adds no fruit juice to his martinis, and gives the pieties of feminism a pass. He has survived knives, a wife, bullets, nasty mechanical pincers, beatings, grenades, piranhas, and tortures too beastly to describe in a family newspaper. He's seen off Blofeld, Goldfinger, Scaramanga, No, Drax, and even that impertinent oaf, Austin Powers. He has weathered the challenges of SMERSH, Rosa Klebb's shoes, Roger Moore's safari suits, and the notion that M can be Dame Judi Dench. Now 007 faces his greatest, and potentially most humiliating, threat yet. James Bond - sophisticate, seducer, secret agent - has just been reimagined as a 13-year-old boy.

Charlie Higson's "SilverFin" (Miramax Books, 335 pages, $16.95), the first of five planned "Young James Bond" novels, was published in Britain earlier this year to dark mutterings from the veteran spy's fans, critical approval, and impressively strong sales. Now (don't tell Felix Leiter) it has been released over here. A comic book is also in the works. There is, predictably enough, also talk of a movie, although widespread (and now denied) rumors that the film would star Orlando Bloom as Bond Jr. seemed to ignore the fact that, fresh-faced though he may be, the former elf is well past puberty.

If all this sounds like there is someone somewhere trying to milk an old franchise for all it's worth, that's because it's true. Ian Fleming came from a distinguished, and famously shrewd, Scottish banking family that has never, in all its long history, been known to overlook the chance of making a pound or two. Fleming sold a controlling stake in his literary estate to the publishers, Booker plc, before his death, but the Fleming family bought it back in the late 1990s, and (the London Guardian reports) "a wave of new projects, including Bond merchandising and games, is being prepared."

The early chapters of "SilverFin" show the fine-tuned commercial instincts of those canny Scots at work. Its opening chapters set the scene in a manner that cannot fail to lure in all those potential buyers bored of waiting, waiting, waiting for their next fix of J.K. Rowling. Like Harry Potter, young Bond is an orphan, although mountaineering, not magic, is to blame for his parents' unfortunate demise. Like Potter, Bond is sent off to boarding school. An unconvincingly described Eton stands in for Hogwarts.

Needless to say, poor James has to contend with his very own Draco Malfoy, a villainous fellow pupil with, like Draco, a powerful father behind him. Trapped by the decidedly unsupernatural nature of his hero, Mr. Higson is unable to add the additional excitement of a brutal contact sport played on flying broomsticks: There's no Quidditch at Eton. Bond triumphs, instead, in cross-country running.

Mr. Higson's decision to cast as Bond's best chums two Indian and Chinese boys, rare birds indeed in a "public" school in 1930s England, is probably no less calculated. Pritpal Nandra and Tommy Chong will delight the diversity police always so busy patrolling the world of children's literature, and probably be good boxoffice, too. The same is true of "Red" Kelly, Bond's handily proletarian sidekick, useful in a punch-up and essential for giving young James the street cred that today's market calls for. We are told early on that Kelly thinks the privileged Etonian is "all right" despite being a "toff," and thus a member, we are supposed to understand, of a hated enemy caste.

That such touches are hopelessly anachronistic does not seem to worry the author too much. With the exception of a few pieces of carefully inserted period detail, there is little about this book that gives any real sense of the time in which it is supposedly set. Or, for that matter, the place: The Scotland in which James's adventure comes to its pleasantly savage conclusion is as bogus as "Brigadoon," utterly lacking the beguiling tweedy tartan authenticity that John Buchan brought to his "Thirty-Nine Steps."

Despite these - considerable - flaws, the second half of "SilverFin" gallops splendidly along with a fabulously nutty plot that involves sinister German scientists, carnivorous eels, man-eating pigs, daring escapes, grotesque deaths, a megalomaniac American businessman, and enough steroid abuse to launch a baseball team. Once he gets going, Mr. Higson displays a fine sense of pace, and a genuine ability to write the enjoyably un pleasant descriptions that will delight the small ghouls who will make up so much of his audience:

"James recoiled, but then forced himself to look at what had once been a man. ... The face was wrecked: it looked as if it had been split down the middle and forced apart, so that the nose was flattened and stretched, the teeth had separated and the eyes had curved around almost to the sides of his head. The eyes were the worst part. They were dark and wet, and James saw in them, not murder, but sadness and pain."

That's splendid stuff, but not quite good enough to buy forgiveness for what "SilverFin" (not to mention the annoying anti-smoking infomercials that pop up periodically throughout the book in an attempt, presumably, to dispel the fatal allure of a certain special agent's Balkan- and Turkish-blend cigarettes) could do to the commander's image. Those of his fans brave enough to read it will need to take appropriate steps afterward to banish the idea of 007 as a retro Cody Banks from their heads.

May I suggest a couple of vodka martinis? Shaken, not stirred.

Roaring Back From - and for - the Dead

Michael J. Graetz & Ian Shapiro: Death by a Thousand Cuts - The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth

The New York Sun, May 16, 2005

There are few more ominous signs of a grim read ahead than "advance praise" by the pompous, pedestrian, and stupendously dull Bill Bradley. According to the former New Jersey lawmaker, "Death by a Thousand Cuts" (Princeton University Press, 372 pages, $29.95) is "immensely readable ... an illuminating look at the estate tax and its implications for future American tax policy." The phrases "tax policy" and "immensely readable" are not usually found in the same sentence, but Mr. Bradley is, for once, quite right. Written in a bright, breezy style, "Death by a Thousand Cuts" is as about as accessible as a book about tax could ever hope to be. It is, indeed, "illuminating," but not in the way that the much unmissed senator would like you to think.

While "Death by a Thousand Cuts," a chronicle of the events leading up to the repeal of the death tax, has much that is intriguing to say about that blessed event, its real interest is as evidence of the way many members of the liberal establishment (the book's authors are both professors at Yale) have been left by an electorate set on ignoring their advice. Accepting that they simply lost the argument is out of the question. Instead they prefer to fall back on "forgive them; for they know not what they do" as an excuse for the voters' intolerable behavior - an explanation that is, when coming from anyone other than a messiah, remarkably patronizing.

So, for example, Thomas Frank, the writer of the best-selling "What's the Matter With Kansas?" a sporadically entertaining, if nutty, polemic, concludes that the inhabitants of Toto's home turf (and by implication much of the rest of the country) have been so befuddled by the culture wars that they fail to understand that their self-interest really would be best served by adopting the economic policies of William Jennings Bryan. "Death by a Thousand Cuts" shares that same disdain for the average voter. Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro throw a highbrow hissy fit at the gullibility, effrontery, and downright stupidity of a nation of rubes unwilling or unable to understand what is in their best interest.

Struck by the fact that only around 2% of corpses will actually pay the death tax (the tax euphemistically referred to as the "estate tax"), the authors conclude that the widespread opposition to this squalid levy among the less affluent can be explained by their ignorance and, more sinisterly, the manipulation of that ignorance by a small coterie of determined ideologues conspiring to end "progressive" taxation, trash the New Deal, wreck the Great Society, and, doubtless, slaughter the firstborn. Okay, perhaps not the last.

For tales of conspiracy to resonate, however, the conspirators need a little heft and a lot of secrecy. The difficulty faced by the authors of this book is that the principal plotters - a think tank or two and, inevitably in a tax scrap, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform - look a touch puny, and they did much of what they did in public. They were trying to win a debate, and it's difficult to object to that. To beef up the sense of menace, therefore, Messrs. Graetz and Shapiro throw in tales of funding by "big money" and the "ultrarich," including Richard Mellon Scaife, a useful bogeyman since, at least, the dog days of the Lewinsky era.

The handy implication is that the abolition of the death tax owed as much to plutocratic selfishness as it did to genuine political conviction. Better still, if the authors can show that defenders of the tax were outspent by those who wanted to scrap it, then they can argue that it was not ideas that made the difference, but cash. The problem is that, despite a chapter subtly titled "Money, Money, Money," they cannot.

While the abolitionists may ultimately have had more resources specifically dedicated to this issue than their opponents, the death tax had enormous institutional support. Immune from serious challenge for decades, it was seen in Washington, in the academy, and in the press as part of the social consensus, as American as apple pie and April 15. Those who challenged it were underdogs, no-hopers, long shots - Davids, not Goliaths. But, as Davids are sometimes prone to do, on this occasion they won.

To claim, as Messrs. Graetz and Shapiro try so hard to do, that this was principally a triumph of generous funding, canny propaganda, and false consciousness is nonsense. The death tax may have been levied on the few, but it did its unfair share to darken the dreams of the many. As voters came to understand, and as was proved by the repeated reluctance of politicians to increase the level at which it began to bite (in 1993 Dick Gephardt even proposed lowering it to include estates of $200,000), the death tax was an attack on aspiration, a door slammed in the face of those strivers essential to the success of any economy - strivers who unlike the very rich have neither the time nor the money to construct elaborate shelters against the depredations of a greedy government.

Even now the death tax is not dead. It will shrink over the next few years until "final" repeal in 2010, only to come roaring back from - and for - the dead in 2011.This will not only undo all the good that will flow from its demise, but will also make 2010 an exceptionally perilous year for rich folk with greedy relatives. A far better course would be to put a stake through this monster's heart once and for all - and soon. Mr. Norquist? Professor Van Helsing?

There's Nothing About Drew

Fever Pitch

The New york Sun, April 8, 2005

The best thing that can be said about the new American "adaptation" of "Fever Pitch" that opens this week is that its directors - the usually reliable Farrelly brothers - knew that doing justice to Nick Hornby's morosely funny memoir was beyond them. Instead, they borrowed, then watered down, his sports-obsessed persona, added elements of the romance thrown into the English film of the book, and moved the whole thing to Beantown. Dour, dull, relentless Arsenal and its terrifying fans of 20 years ago, a horde out of Peckinpah, are transformed into Capra cornpone: the feisty, loveable Red Sox, and the feisty, loveable salts of the earth that worship them. To describe the script as lame would be to dis the disabled; let's just say that stock footage of Boston's not particularly inspiring skyline (included, doubtless, to make viewers forget the fact that much of the film was shot in Toronto) provides some of "Fever Pitch's more entertaining moments.

As the Hornby character, Ben, Jimmy Fallon of "Saturday Night Live" does what he can to liven up a movie that is, whatever your view of cryonics, more dead than Ted Williams. He's not helped by Drew Barrymore, still clinging to the sweetheart image she so laboriously built up after falling from disgrace. She portrays Lindsey, Ben's supposedly sophisticated investment banker girlfriend, as Laurie Partridge with a spreadsheet.

In truth, however, Lindsey and Ben only play supporting roles to the real stars of this film, the Boston Red Sox and their regrettable (look, this is The New York Sun you're reading) come-from-behind victory at the end of last season. If you want to savor those moments again, but this time in the context of an utterly unconvincing love story, see this movie.

Nick Hornby: Fever Pitch

Yes, the ball is round, but all the rest is wrong

In the decade or so since it first appeared, as unexpected as an English World Cup victory, Nick Hornby's peculiar, touching, and obsessive "Fever Pitch" has established itself as part of Britain's pop-cultural canon, a bestselling book that wowed both snooty critics and a legion of fans rarely seen studying a page without pictures. Just as remarkably, it was a memoir centered on football that won over those who knew little, and cared less, about a game of 90 minutes devoted to the kicking of a small round ball.

Round ball? Ah yes, Mr. Hornby was writing about what we Brits call "football" - something never, ever, to be confused with the ponderous spectacle known internationally, and with some disdain, as "American football." Nor, for that matter, should it be muddled up with the effete "soccer" played in the United States. That's a genteel game favored by high school girls and Title IX vigilantes, a pastime of great importance to the moms who are this country's most annoying political demographic, but which has had little to offer the rest of us since the sad moment Brandi Chastain pulled her shirt back on.

A few years ago, Mr. Hornby adapted his book for a British movie version of "Fever Pitch" (1997) transforming his oddball chronicle into a routinely soapy romance with the home team playing the role of the Other Woman (a theme which he dealt with more effectively in "High Fidelity," with old records, his other obsession, standing in for the Gunners). Now it has been again adapted, this time by the Farrelly brothers, into a disappointing film about, of all things, baseball.

Don't waste your time with either of these movies: Read the book.

The sport Mr. Hornby describes so well is not the glossy, celebrity-drenched "beautiful game" of English myth and Latin reality, but something altogether more dreary - something very specific, mercifully, to its awful era and depressing place, the disheartening, despondent England of 20 or 30 years ago. The games were dull, uninspired, and bloody, 11-a-side recreations of the battle of the Somme, marked, only (to borrow Mr. Hornby's phrase) by "dingy competence." If "you want entertainment," snarled one well-known coach, "go and watch clowns."

This was a time long, long before David Beckham, gentrification, and all-seater stadiums. It is a time remembered best with the help of driving rain, damp discomfort, and the smell of cigarettes and stale beer, a time when the game was dominated by characters like Arsenal's burly and menacing Charlie George, a creature whose very existence was proof that Neanderthal Man had survived into modern times. Mr. George was legendary, Mr. Hornby explains, for his inarticulacy, lack of savvy in dealing with the press, and, above all, the way in which the player's "long, lank hair remained unfeathered and unlayered right up until the time he unwisely decided upon a bubble perm from hell some time in the mid-seventies." No Posh for you, mate.

Back then, attending the Saturday afternoon footie, a blue-collar staple stretching back for a century, was an old rite rapidly turning rancid, marked by squalid, dangerously cramped stadiums, declining attendance and the constant threat of punch-ups, and worse, between warring fans. In the 1970s the violence was bad enough, but in the decade that followed "it was," Mr. Hornby wrote, "less predictable and much nastier. Police confiscated knives and machetes and other weapons ... things with spikes coming out of them; and there was that famous photograph of a fan with a dart sticking out of his nose."

Under the circumstances, it's a relief to report that, while its distinctly local flavor means that "Fever Pitch" is a book that will always be a minority taste in the United States, there's much more to it than reminiscences of a North London team whose exploits, however beautifully retold, are unlikely to compete with the fall of Troy as a saga with staying power. "Fever Pitch" is as much the self-mocking story of one man's obsession as it is a chronicle of games long gone: "With twenty minutes to go, Exeter went into the lead, and my girlfriend ... promptly did what I had always presumed women were apt to do at moments of crisis: she fainted. Her girlfriend took her off to see the ... ambulance men; I, meanwhile, did nothing, apart from pray for an equalizer."

If you are contemplating those words and thinking Mr. Hornby demonstrated an admirable sense of the right priorities, "Fever Pitch" is the book for you, and even more so for those understanding enough to be your friends. The stats-crazed, emotional roller-coaster, monomaniacal mind of the madder type of sports fan has rarely, if ever, been better described or, for that matter, more seductively. Following its publication, a startled nation suddenly found itself engulfed by copycat football nerds - boring, but essentially benign, and rarely associated with things with spikes.

But it is as autobiography that "Fever Pitch" really excels. Mr. Hornby was introduced to the game by his father, desperate to find something, anything, he could share with a young son hurt and angered by dad's departure from the family home. And it worked: "Saturday afternoons in North London gave us a context in which we could be together. We could talk when we wanted, the football gave us something to talk about ... and the days had a structure, a routine," Mr. Hornby wrote. "The Arsenal pitch was to be our lawn; the Gunners' Fish Bar on Blackstock Road our kitchen; and the West Stand our home." Supporting Arsenal ("the Gunners") became the means by which the boy finds himself and, finally, gradually, rather belatedly, comes of age, a story Hornby tells in a manner that is distinctively his own.

Mr. Hornby's own film adaptation was an agreeable enough effort, but it never won the audience of the original. To understand why, just compare the movie's conventionally happy conclusion with the book's final paragraph:

"Against Aston Villa, one week after Wrexham, my whole life flashed before my eyes. A nil-nil draw, against a nothing team, in a meaningless game, in front of a restive, occasionally angry but for the most part wearily tolerant crowd, in the freezing January cold. ... All that was missing was Ian Ure falling over his feet, and my dad, grumbling away in the seat next to me."

You don't get better than that.