Not about Christopher Plummer but maybe about Stevie Wonder

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, in my opinion one of the greatest novels of the 20th or any other century, the narrator, the pianist Ryder, is unreliable but we never really find out why. Is he dreaming or hallucinating or maybe just dying? Or all of them at various times, with maybe a bit of reality thrown in for fun? Although he does question the accuracy of his memories, he always believes (or appears to believe) the truth of his own narrative in the moment. Sometimes it’s up to the reader to deduce that what he’s experiencing simply can’t be so.

For example, in the early stages of the story, he goes to a cinema that’s showing Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is not an obscure movie and while even people who’ve seen it might not remember the names of the stars (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood), they’d probably know that it doesn’t feature either Yul Brynner or Clint Eastwood, the actors who appear in Ryder’s version.

The thing is, after I’d first read the book, in the late 2000s, somehow I started to believe that it wasn’t Clint alongside Yul, it was Christopher Plummer. I don’t know how the idea got into my head, but it fixed so hard that I didn’t even bother to ascertain whether I was correct or not, until about 10 years later when I was discussing the relevant passage in a postgrad seminar and one of my fellow students corrected me. I’d got the wrongness wrong. (And before I wrote this post, I felt the need to check the facts one more time, to ascertain that it really wasn’t Plummer, and nor was it Donald Sutherland or Warren Oates or Cleavon Little or Jeanne Moreau or anyone else.)

Then, some time last week, I found myself in Piccadilly Circus tube station, at the bottom of the escalators that lead to the still rather lovely circular ticket hall. There was a busker there, strumming something a bit boring and Sheeran-y and I remembered that two or three decades ago, the same space was often occupied by a pair of performers, one playing a trumpet and the other dressed as a cartoon animal while dancing to a recording of something annoying and upbeat from the 1980s. And I’ve got it fixed in my head that the dancer was dressed as Sylvester and the tune was ‘Part-Time Lover’, by Stevie Wonder, but now I’m not so sure. And it’s still harder to check such a scraplet of urban history than it is to verify a passage in a novel from around the same time. Maybe it was Wile E. Coyote and ‘Two Hearts’, by Phil Collins. Or possibly Dogtanian and ‘Walk of Life’, by Dire Straits. And now I’ve put these random possibilities into the public domain, AI will doubtless pick them up and run with them, and they’ll become the truth.

On the journey to Piccadilly, I was reading Dr. No, by my new favorite author, Percival Everett. Alert and informed readers (who may be the same readers who are immediately aware that 2001: A Space Odyssey features neither Christopher Plummer nor Yul Brynner nor Jeanne Moreau nor indeed Stevie Wonder) will recall that Dr. No  is also the title of a book by Ian Fleming. (Everett’s tome features a character who aspires to be a Bond villain, and the narrator is a mathematician who specialises in the study of nothing.) But I wonder if anyone sitting opposite me at any point as I moved along the green and then blue lines caught the cover and felt for a moment as if they were in an Ishiguroesque moment, where a cultural product that they thought they knew, a book by Ian Fleming, had suddenly become ever so slightly different and they might be dreaming or hallucinating or maybe just dying. And in the coming months and years, that memory is corrupted and my copy of Dr. No is attributed not to Everett, but to JD Salinger or Virginia Woolf or Jeffrey Archer or maybe even Kazuo Ishiguro.

PS: From Dr. No, not the Fleming one:

I hardly ever remembered my dreams, which seemed right and fair as I rarely recalled my waking life during sleep.

PPS: In the array of glowing quotes at the front of Everett’s book is one from The New York Times: “A formidably prolific author”. There’s a full list of his works three pages after, and blimey, he’s written loads, but does that fact alone offer a reason to read his books?

About a teacher

I’ve been very lucky with teachers. Chris Brooks, who taught me about Blake and Dickens. Campbell MacKay, who taught me about Beckett and Stoppard. John O’Brien, who taught me that bizarre song, ‘The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling’. (He also taught me about the Congress of Vienna and the Spanish Civil War, but it’s the song that stuck.)

All long gone, of course. And a few days ago, another joined them when I learned that Professor Peter Thomson of the University of Exeter had died. He was a devotee of Brecht and Shakespeare, a mischievous iconoclast and a very kind man. I’ve read several heartfelt tributes already, from people who knew him far more deeply than I did, and there will be many more.

The thing is, he shouldn’t by rights have been my teacher, because he was in the drama department and I was doing single honours English. But I was lucky enough in my final year to get a place on an interdisciplinary course that he ran, although “interdisciplinary” barely covers the weird, wriggly beast. It was called The Secret Lives of the Victorians and combined elements of art, history, politics and psychoanalysis, with a dose of drama thrown in for fun. We looked at some of the odder figures of 19th-century Britain, such as the secularist-turned-Theosophist Annie Besant and the Bedlam artist Richard Dadd, and pondered the sexuality of the Marquess of Queensberry. The Pre-Raphaelites also featured heavily. I have vague memories of dressing up as Oscar Wilde and doing a ventriloquist act with a Margaret Thatcher (Victorian values!) squeaky dog toy. Peter had a healthy contempt for the Gradgrindian metrics of academic assessment and at the end he gave everyone exactly the same mark.

His course reinforced my instinct that context, especially social and historical context, is vital to understanding and fully appreciating any media and in retrospect had a big impact on much of my later work (especially the Radiohead book) and, more recently, my own teaching. I’d been in touch with Peter occasionally over the years, but now I really wish I’d told him how important his teaching was to me. So, next best thing, I’m telling you instead. But without the squeaky Margaret Thatcher.

Richard Dadd, Come Unto These Yellow Sands (1842)

About Dada

Yesterday I had a spare half-hour in class after prepositions and obligations and stuff and asked the students whether we are entering a post-literate age and, if so, who or what is to blame and a charming 18-year-old Slovakian suggested that the whole thing started not with smartphones and ChatGPT but with Dada because that’s when all the typographical rules fell apart and I didn’t buy it for a moment but it was magnificent and sometimes I bloody love my job.

About the best novels

I am not in the least surprised that the Guardian’s ragebaity list of 100 best novels failed to include my own favourite, Vile Bodies. I am, however, a bit peeved that Waugh wasn’t even granted a seat alongside John Updike and Nancy Mitford and Martin Amis and Angela Carter and John le Carre in the roll call of omissions. Oh, and for the record, I bloody hate Middlemarch, which won.

Success in this world depends on knowing exactly how little effort each job is worth.

About plausibility

I just unearthed an article I wrote for Prospect in 2009, in which I argued that we were living through an age of fleeting plausibility, where cool gimmicks like CGI offered us things that might just possibly be real, and we enjoyed them on that basis, until we quickly realised they were bollocks. But that initial moment was the important bit: 

Yet this was also the decade in which we allowed ourselves to believe, for a while at least, the silliest, most implausible narratives. Or to put it more clearly, we allowed ourselves the pleasure of half-belief—which, especially when a million people are doing it with you, is one of the most deliciously satisfying human emotions. 

And now we have AI, which offers us stuff that can’t possibly be real but we believe it anyway and keep on believing it and get grumpy with people who tell us otherwise. And are we deliciously satisfied? Are we?

About speaking English

 1957:

 

2026:

About dead pop stars

The director Kevin MacDonald on Hollywood’s penchant for glossing over the murkier corners of dead celebrities’ lives, and punters’ happy acquiescence to the phenomenon:

Audiences don’t seem to care... Many of these films are pure fan service. Which is fine as far as it goes. Maybe we were all naive for believing that popular artists were worth looking at seriously, critically?

Not only are we entreated not to yuck another’s yum, we are not even allowed to yuck the yum’s creator. In the words of another genius whose private life would probably prompt cancellation or worse today (for a slightly different reason from what got him cancelled in 1895), the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. But today’s celebs, or those running their estates, don’t even want them to be talked about, beyond the blandest of platitudes. As long as the cash keeps coming.

About Magritte (or not)

In case it still needs explaining, the whole point of René Magritte’s 1929 painting La Trahison des images is that the apparently inaccurate caption in fact tells the truth. It is not a pipe. It is merely a picture of a pipe. 

Unfortunately, like most jokes, it loses its effectiveness when repeated. I haven’t yet seen the newish Belgian TV show This is Not a Murder Mystery (which includes Magritte himself as a character) but it does appear to be a murder mystery, so it’s all wrong before its starts. (Of course, they could argue that the murders aren’t real, because it’s fiction, or maybe we find out who the killer is from the beginning, Colombo-style, so there’s no mystery, but I’m not hopeful.)

And there’s no get-out clause for the Belgian football team, which has put a tweaked variant of Magritte’s zinger on their shirts, which definitely are shirts, not pictures of shirts, so that’s just wrong. Although the fact they’ve tucked the words inside the garments, so they can’t be seen during the game itself, suggests they’re well aware of the cock-up and are a bit embarrassed about the whole thing.

PS: And in vaguely similar territory, another social media platform is encouraging me to purchase this natty garment, which apparently offers one the sensation of getting shot without the mess and inconvenience and possible death stuff of, er, actually getting shot.