Tag: school

BR#8 – One For The Road

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I still refer to these as book reviews when if we’re all honest they’re probably something else. What they actually are I’ll leave to the annuls of history to decide but in the meantime and for the sake of form they’ll continue to be book reviews. I am reviewing plays seemingly more regularly than books too, although a play is still arguably a book, but with One For The Road by Harold Pinter being a one act play, only sixteen pages long, it’s more of a pamphlet than anything else. It’s so short in fact that when I finished reading it I decided to read it again, just because, well, why not.

One For The Road is set in what I assume is some kind of headquarters of the secret police under a totalitarian regime. The man in charge refers to patriots so you can imagine nationalism plays a role but he refers to god more often which makes me believe this is some Christian fundamentalist regime on par with Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale. That probably just exposes my ignorance of a better relatable example and a sign of my being lazy. It also ignores the general complicity of the Church in right wing totalitarian states in our history so it could just be a simple case of something along those lines.

The story revolves around what can be classed as interviews between someone of importance, potentially the head of the secret police, and individually the three members of a family taken in for interrogation. The father / husband, wife / mother and their son. The man is beaten and while he challenges his interrogator slightly he generally remains silent and passive. It is likely they have all been arrested because of his political activity. The woman talks more, although there are more direct questions and it is revealed she is being repeatedly raped. Her father is also revealed to be a national hero, a heroic soldier who fought and died in some war that presumably led to the establishment of this state. While the boy who is only seven we discover spat at and kicked the arresting soldiers when they came to his house. At the end he is referred to in the past tense. The interrogator is constantly pouring himself drinks and suggesting it’s one for the road but the implications are more that this will be one for the road before they are released. This of course doesn’t come and there is something chilling in this psychological torture too. That is basically the story, which I’ve now given away but in such a crude manner I’ve not gone near to doing it justice.

I know very little about Harold Pinter beyond his name. I did study Drama for my A-Levels at school but like everything was left incredibly unimpressed by any teachings provided, although my lack of effort and involvement mustn’t be discounted. It is only now as I get older that I start to understand that these things can actually be enjoyable. It is short and I would be curious how and in what circumstances the play would be performed. There are a lot of pauses so potentially they would make better use of them than I did but it was a good introduction to his work. I look forward to reading some more, maybe even a full length one next time. He certainly appears to be someone I could get into.

Modern Morality & Historical Identity

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

There is a common theme running through our historical education at school. It is usually the simple narrative that supports our national identity and message; that we as a country haven’t really done much wrong. We learn about the two World Wars from the British perspective, the industrial revolution, The Soviet Union and never in a favourable way and sometimes the Napoleonic Wars but are taught about it and him from a very different angle than the French are. Which means every country does it and that is why this isn’t a piece bashing the UK and suggesting we’re wrong in a world of right. There is currently much discussion about Churchill or the philanthropic slave trader Edward Colston and we as a populace are being forced to explore their roles in our national identity with a different set of eyes. This can only be a good thing because to describe someone such as Churchill as the greatest Briton of all time must only ever sugar coat the actions he took that led to people suffering. Equally not everything he did was bad so it’s important to examine him and his legacy from all angles and in a fair way. We live in an age of trial by social media but once the furore dies down I suspect their will be a few historic individuals with slightly different identities than before.

We are re-addressing our own history then and as long as that’s not with corrupted intentions it can only ever be a good thing. It is important to realise though that we are doing so with our modern take on morality and while it doesn’t absolve people of their wrongs it is still important to take into consideration the times in which they lived. That doesn’t entirely excuse them of course because there are plenty of examples of people in their time expressing beliefs more attuned to our contemporary ideals. Slave traders can not be excused when there are so many examples of people trying to eradicate the practice at the time for example. It can be used by apologists as an excuse but it is important to remember that we are viewing a different time when trying to understand previous takes on racism, sexism and power.

Which begs the question of whether we need to take into consideration how future generations may view us now. Will they understand our actions on race, sex, religion or economic productivity and think us simply abhorrent. On the other hand will they view all religion as abhorrent. I have called people fascists in the past in a derogatory way but had historical events turned out differently that word would have a different meaning. Ultimately we have no idea how our societies and our moralities will evolve and how we will be viewed in the future but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take it into consideration. Our behaviour in combating climate change is one such example. If we carry on like this I suspect it’ll be pretty clear how we’ll be viewed. It could be argued this will tie in with whether we manage to overcome neoliberal capitalism and what kind of society we manage to create in the next fifty years. It is easy to criticise people from the past and sometimes rightly so but it’s important now in understanding our own actions that one day we too will be someones past.

BR#5 – Frankenstein

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From time to time as adults we throw a little classic in to our reading. The kind of story that spawned others and has passed the test of time. The kind you could have studied at school. That last one in a way makes it sound unappealing considering we don’t always look back on the book we studied at school fondly. Frankenstein though isn’t one of them, it’s one of the ones you wish you had studied at school. It has so many of those moments you could see yourself analysing in a class, it has layers. It is also very simple and obvious. A main uncomplicated but unbelievable story. Take it at face value and that’s it.

The writing feels like it could be updated although it shouldn’t ever happen. When things are translated they are also updated in language and in a subtle way style. A book written in English will forever be ageing. I would love to know how Tolstoy sounds to a Russian than he is in the latest translation I read. In that sense I can tell it was written in the early nineteenth century. While that’s not a problem it will be one day.

Shelley approaches all sorts of ideas and concepts throughout the book. They are too numerous to go into detail in just five hundred words but she discusses justice, the role of god, she approaches ideas of personhood and what is is to be a person, our understanding of ethics, even existentialism but this was long before it had become an ism. This is an entire philosophy course for a year covered. There are many essays written on it. I imagine it’s a common understanding too that there is the potential schizophrenia angle which relates in a way to ideas of duality in the book. They need each other, the monster never tries to hurt him and when he dies the monster goes off to die too. Did Frankenstein give a part of himself in the creation of the monster. In a way the monster shows more of what we call humanity than Viktor Frankenstein who in the end becomes a monster himself in a sad way. In a contemporary sense we could think of the development of Artificial Intelligence. The monster has not only an ability to learn but has self-consciousness, the ultimate stage of creating free thinking robots. I could go on and on.

Quite interestingly the book has nearly as interesting a back story. Mary Shelley was the daughter of the revolutionary thinkers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the wife of the poet Percy Shelley. In the ‘Year Without Summer’ of 1816 when they were visiting the exiled and infamous poet and writer amongst many things, Lord Byron in Switzerland, the weather forced them to stay indoors and Byron came up with the idea they all wrote horror stories. In a dream over the next few nights the story of Frankenstein and his monster came to Mary Shelley.

Along with all this and not to be forgotten it’s actually quite a good story. You don’t just read it to learn and look smart, you read it to enjoy. I assume they teach it in schools still and if they don’t can’t think why. It’s so full of everything it would be a waste. I ended it really feeling happy that I had just read a good book. We all should, we may just learn a little eloquence and humanity from a monster.