Journalism

An interview with Ali Smith: “We are a selfish generation”

Ali Smith’s house is tucked into a neat cul-de-sac about ten minutes’ walk from Cambridge station. It had been a couple of years since I’d last visited her, and so I’d had to ask for directions again. Better take a wrong turning once you’re in Ali’s company rather than before: she would ensure that any error became an adventure. But when I arrive at her door, a neatly written sign with my name on it, and an arrow pointing off to the left, is tucked into the frame, instructing me not to knock but rather to head to the next door but one. So I knock at No 2, instead of No 6, and there she is, the beaming, wise, sprightly presence that is Ali Smith, in a neat little house that is a mirror of the one I’ve been in before.

“Commander!” I say in greeting – she’s just been made a CBE in the New Year Honours List. “Oh, just call me Comma,” is the riposte. And that is Ali Smith all over, for in person she is as she appears in her books: modest and funny but fiercely intelligent and unfailingly able to find the right word – but not the one that you would ever find.

An interview with Margaret Atwood

An autumn morning in Ilkley, North Yorkshire. Summer has finally slunk away, and not long after breakfast I find myself tramping, in the chill grey air, down the hill to the train station with Margaret Atwood. She is dressed in sensible travelling black, but for a colourful scarf and pink-and-purple sneakers. Last night she filled a hall of more than 500 people at the Ilkley Literature Festival, nearly all of whom, it seemed, then stood in line to have their books signed. Some of them had just bought a copy of Stone Mattress, her new story collection – but most were bringing not only her new book but stacks of well-worn and clearly beloved paperbacks, from The Handmaid’s Tale to Cat’s Eye, from her first novel, The Edible Woman, to Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. The final three are a remarkable trilogy that began to appear a decade ago; a vivid, frightening, and fully realised world that is all too believably a consequence of our present existence.

Germany: Memories of a Nation

“A History of the World in 100 Objects” marked a transformative moment for the British Museum. A groundbreaking project devised in 2010 with BBC Radio 4, it included a 100-part radio series voiced by the museum’s director, Neil MacGregor. Now “Germany: Memories of a Nation”, a similar collaboration developed to mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, sees Mr MacGregor’s erudite, entertaining voice returning to the airwaves. He narrates another project that again hopes to make its audience reassess stories they thought they knew and consider those they never knew at all. This combination of radio series, book and exhibition seems particularly deserving of attention in a year that also marks the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war, an anniversary that has not necessarily encouraged a thoughtful examination of German history.

An interview with Ken Burns

Perhaps you can’t imagine why you would commit yourself to a 14-hour film about the Roosevelts. Yes, Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of the United States, has his face up on Mount Rushmore; sure, we know that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were hugely significant political figures. But 14 hours, over seven episodes? The film’s creator, the American documentarian Ken Burns, has a snappy one-liner to pull you in. He grins at me conspiratorially over his Caesar salad. “This is the American Downton Abbey,” he says. “Except it’s all true.”

Watching the English — Graham Swift

David Cameron is a bit concerned, as you may have read, that we in this country are in danger of being “bashful about our Britishness”. In the wake of controversy over the reported Islamist influence on some Birmingham schools, the Prime Minister was vocal about the importance of promoting “British values”, though pinning down precisely what those are has not been entirely straightforward (there’s a very British understatement for you).

I don’t reckon Graham Swift would have imagined just how timely the publication of his collection of 25 short stories would be, although he will have known that, after September, he would have to take his chances as to whether a book called England and Other Stories would be read across the border. And no, there is no mention of Wales or Northern Ireland here. Yet this collection is a thoughtful and often moving examination of a good portion of the national character.

England’s landscape and England’s nature – in both senses of the word – have always been close to Swift’s heart, from his first novel, The Sweet-Shop Owner, through to his Fenland masterpiece, Waterland, his Booker Prize-winning Last Orders and Wish You Were Here, published three years ago. Here, in a tightly paced sequence of tales, he ranges across economic circumstance and change and issues of race and class, as well as the matter of love and loss, to consider what makes us who we are.

Some of the stories are slighter than others. Near the beginning of the book, they are too often burdened by an occasionally laboured didacticism. The first story, “Going Up in the World”, introduces us to Charlie Yates, who was born in Wapping in 1951 and is 57 years old as the tale begins. His dad had been a docker and Charlie had become a roofer, eventually working on the towers that rose to the sky in the place where his father had hauled in cargo from all over the world.

Now he and his mate Don have a window-cleaning business, making those towers gleam, buying themselves a good life – one in which their children rise even farther, even faster. Don’s son, Seb, is a banker. Do the maths: 1951 plus 57 years is 2008. See where we’re headed? And fictional coincidence can be jarring. When Swift draws our attention to the amusing fact that the charming women who work together at a fertility clinic are called Holly and Polly (“I’m Holly and this is Polly. Yes, we know”), the reader is left thinking that this is not chance: this is construction.

But there’s much that is affecting in this book. “Ajax” is a tale of suburbia, narrated by a man who looks back at the boy he was and sees how his parents’ neighbour, Mr Wilkinson, fell victim to the kind of fear and conformity that is all the more frightening for existing just a few years after fascism was defeated in Europe. Here, Swift gives his tale room to breathe, so that the play of language is pleasing rather than forced. “When we say scouring powder, Jimmy, we really mean lavatory cleaner, don’t we?” Mr Wilkinson asked the narrator all those years ago. “Did you know, Jimmy, that in Elizabethan times a lavatory was called a jakes? A jakes. Ajax. Do you see the connection?” Jimmy didn’t – and doesn’t until he’s much older and realises just how Mr Wilkinson changed his life.

The strongest of these tales – “Ajax”, “Saint Peter”, “First on the Scene” and, indeed, “England”, the last story in the book – have an undercurrent of fear: the fear of saying what is really meant, the fear of standing out, which is an anxiety that might be thought of as particularly English. In “First on the Scene”, a widower walking in the woods, as he used to do with his late wife, makes a dreadful discovery and thinks, at first, that he might just step away from what he’s found – who would ever know he’d been there? But he realises: “There was something irrevocable about his being here.”

 There is something irrevocable about all of us being here, this book reminds us. Wherever we come from, here we are: it is our actions and the way we tell our stories that will define us. If David Cameron wishes to consider further the notion of British values, he could do worse than turn to Swift’s compact, thought-provoking tales. They offer the complex enlightenment that only good fiction can provide.

England and Other Stories by Graham Swift, Simon & Schuster, 288 pp, £16.99

Bridges of beauty and utility

On the “Bridge” exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands…

We’re heading west along the river on a bright June morning. Towards the prow of our Thames Clipper, under the aegis of the Museum of London, an excitable Dan Cruickshank is singing the praises of a city both divided and united by the Thames – and marvelling at the bridges that leap from shore to shore. “Audacious interventions”, the architectural historian calls them. He’s not wrong.

For by what other method might we walk on water? You could swim across a river if you had to; you could take a ferry boat, too: but it’s hard to carry anything while you doggy-paddle, and as for ferries, if the weather’s bad or the river ices up, you’re stuck. As we cruise towards Vauxhall, the MI6 building squatting glassily on the south bank, Cruickshank points out the spot where the remains of London’s earliest bridge were found: timber piles dating back to the Bronze Age, 3,500 years ago. A millennium and a half had passed before the Romans built the first real London bridge. “Without that crossing, there would be no London,” he says.

So it’s fitting that the newest exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands is simply called “Bridge”. Following on from the success of last year’s“Estuary” show, “Bridge” will be the largest art exhibition ever to be staged at the museum and is a showcase for its remarkable collections and original commissions. It is a reminder, too, that bridges are those rarest of industrial constructions: works of utility that are nearly always beautiful and quite literally uplifting for those who encounter them.

Read the rest in The New Statesman…

Opening the hurt locker

A review of Brian Turner’s memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country; Kevin Powers’ Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting; and Phil Klay’s Redeployment. (And check out Bryan Cranston reading The Things They Carried for audible.co.uk)

“We knew our prelude would be different from the trenches of the First World War or the front lines of Korea,” Brian Turner writes in his fever dream of a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country. Turner joined the US army in 1998 when he was almost 31 – old, for a soldier – and served with Nato forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the close of the 20th century. From the end of 2003, he served in Iraq for a year with the 3rd Stryker Brigade.

The difference Turner alludes to, in this context, is a difference in the conduct of war. There would be no front line, but instead “a 360-degree, three-dimensional environment . . . Anything was possible. A dead farm animal on the shoulder of the road could harbour an improvised bomb sewn into its belly. A bullet might ride the cool currents of air between one human being or another. A Hellcat missile or a wire-guided Tow missile might rend the moment open.”

Hilary Mantel: “Public debate is debased”

The scene is an early supper at the Arden Hotel, Stratford-upon-Avon. The time is just between the penultimate all-day Saturday performances of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the RSC’s adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker-winning novels; the shows will close here in a week’s time before reopening at the Aldwych, in London, in May. The cast round the table is composed of Hilary, her husband Gerald McEwen, her younger brother Brian, Mike Poulton – who crafted these plays in close collaboration with Mantel – and me. We are discussing how familiar most of the audience are with the books. Mantel remarks on the opening of the first play, which finds Thomas Cromwell and Cardinal Wolsey in conference; at the edge of the stage is a young man playing a lute. A few moments in to the scene Wolsey sends him off with an abrupt, “Enough now, Mark.”

“A woman just near me leaned over and whispered to her companion, ‘That’s Mark Smeaton!’ – she was very excited,” Mantel says. It is Smeaton who will, in Bring Up the Bodies, play a crucial role in the fall of Anne Boleyn. And indeed, on the Saturday I was there, although I didn’t hear a whisper, a distinct frisson of recognition ran through the sold-out Swan. And that is the genius of both Mantel’s novels and now their stage adaptations: yes, you know where this story is going – but you are no less glad to be along for the ride.

Henry Marsh: a neurosurgeon at work

Henry Marsh is one of the country’s top neurosurgeons and a pioneer of neurosurgical advances in Ukraine. Erica Wagner witnesses life on a knife-edge.

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It is just after lunchtime on a wet Monday in February when Henry Marsh is finally able to return to the operating theatre in the Atkinson Morley Wing of St George’s Hospital in Tooting, south London, and begin the work that will save a young woman’s life.

Jenny is not long out of her teens; the previous week, she had collapsed – from a haemorrhage, the result of an abnormality in the veins and arteries of her brain. She had been close to death: late at night, Henry had operated to remove a blood clot and save her life. But a later scan showed that the abnormality remained. If the problem was not corrected, she could suffer another bleed at any time. So this will be the second time he has been inside her skull.

While Jenny is prepared, Henry paces the hospital’s long corridors. There is time for us to sit and have a sandwich. He is restless: he wants to get on. He didn’t get this right the first time. He needs to get it right now.

Martin Simpson: “Folk music isn’t about purity”

Let’s get Mumford & Sons out of the way, shall we? I’m chatting with Martin Simpson in advance of the 15th annual BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, which will be held for the first time at the Royal Albert Hall in London – the event’s largest-ever venue – on 19 February. Simpson, who turned 60 last year, is one of the stars of British music. He has been nominated almost 30 times since the awards were launched in 2000, more than any other performer, and for nine consecutive years he was a nominee for Musician of the Year (a prize he has won twice already and is now up for again).