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ART & BOOKS

From Anger to Apathy; The Whisperers; Millais

Books

From Anger to Apathy
The British Experience since 1975
Mark Garnett
Jonathan Cape, €30, ISBN 9780224073066

The past, as British novelist LP Hartley famously wrote, is a different country: they do things differently there. This sentiment provides the underlying thrust of this interesting but in the end somewhat unsatisfactory account of British political and social history over the past 32 years. The 1970s are undergoing a renaissance in the British imagination, as the hit BBC TV series Life on Mars demonstrates; for the Briton tired of consumerism, superficiality and long working hours, the era of smoky pubs, Ford Cortinas, the Bay City Rollers and the three-day week seems an improbable golden age. At first glance, it really was a different time: before the era of mass immigration, a black or brown face in 1975 was a relatively unusual sight (so much so that having a black upwardly mobile family living next to a working-class white one became the subject of a hit TV sitcom). There has been a big change in British attitudes: in 1975, the year after the Heath government lost an election called on the question of who governs Britain (the answer, four years before Margaret Thatcher came to power, was the unions), Britain’s European and US allies thought the country “ungovernable”. There was anger at the loss of Empire and Britain’s declining international status, at the economy with its high inflation and low growth, and at the sense that everything was slipping away. Today, 32 years later, as voters at successive elections demonstrate, apathy is more apparent (although the anger has hardly dissipated altogether).

“The main reason is that Britain is now dominated by individualistic materialism,” Garnett writes, attributing this to the Thatcher era, the rise of the culture of celebrity and the increasing tendency of Britons to associate themselves with the US.

Garnett concludes on a rather pessimistic note, referring to Tony Blair’s farewell speech. “He closed … with the words ‘good luck’, and the people he was leaving behind in Britain were certainly going to need it”.

As I write this review, Britain has just experienced its first bank run since the 1860s in a crisis situation involving the government and Bank of England. It actually called to mind the 1970s, and the era of Slater-Walker and of a government not being fully in control of events. Pop music, hair length and trouser width may be different today, but deep down, perhaps things really haven’t changed that much after all. JK

The Whisperers
Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
Orlando Figes
Allen Lane, €45, ISBN 0713997028

The Russian language has two words for a “whisperer” – one for somebody who whispers out of fear of being overheard (shepchushchii), and another for the person who informs or whispers behind people’s backs to the authorities (sheptun). The distinction has its origin in the idiom of the Stalin period, when the whole of Soviet society was made up of whisperers of one sort or another. Figes’ latest tome is not about Stalin; it is the distillation of several hundred family archives that serve as a microcosmic reminder of the suffering that the dictator brought to millions.

By conservative estimates, around 25 million people were repressed by the Soviet regime between 1928, when Stalin seized control of the country, and 1953, when he died. This number – people shot by death squads, gulag prisoners, slave labourers of various kinds and members of deported nationalities – represent about one eighth of the Soviet Union’s population in 1941.

In his award-winning 2003 book Natasha’s Dance, Figes enchantingly waltzed through Russian cultural events from the 12th century to the Soviet era. The title is from a scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Natasha Rostov and her brother Nikolai are invited by their “uncle” to a rustic cabin to listen to him play Russian folk music. Natasha instinctively begins a dance prompted by “unknown feelings in her heart”.

The Whisperers weaves a much more sinister and direct path to Russia’s heart of darkness. Between 2003 and 2006, researchers in St Petersburg, Moscow and Perm recovered several hundred family effects that had been concealed by the survivors of the Stalinist terror in secret drawers and under mattresses in private homes across Russia. Extensive interviews were carried out with the oldest members of each family, who explained the context of these private documents and related them to the family’s history. Figes alchemises this collection of documents and testimonies into a haunting account of the Stalinist period.

Some critics praised Martin Amis’s mid-1990s book about Stalin, Koba the Dread, for bringing attention to a much-neglected subject. Christopher Hitchens, in The Atlantic, applauded Amis because he “makes us wince again at things we already ‘knew’”, while Amis himself castigated “the left” for underplaying Stalin’s sins.

In the interim there have been several other books and articles, some provoked by Amis’s work. The Whisperers is particularly powerful because of the hundreds of tiny and desperate intimacies it reveals. It is particularly timely considering the scale and brutality of the totalitarian regimes currently commanding our news bulletins and also the number of political commentators on the left whose misguided idealism continues to muffle dissenting voices. BF

Europe: East and West
Norman Davies
Pimlico, €22, ISBN 9780712609500

Davies’ magisterial tome Europe divided readers – many thought it overly selective, though this is understandable given that it was a single-volume history of the European continent – but this lively, albeit sometimes overly intellectual successor is a worthy follow-up. Comprising recent essays and lectures, it takes some of Davies’ arguments further, dealing with topics such as the decline of Europe’s Jews and the rise of Islam, and Britain’s ongoing crisis of identity (accentuated by devolution) – with the dissolution of the British identity regarded as a long-term probability. Davies can be provocative and occasionally wrong, but he is never dull. Recommended. JK

The Economist Pocket World in Figures
2008 Edition
Profi le Books, €16, ISBN 9781861978448

This is a handy little volume crammed with global facts, figures and statistics. The world rankings cover the expected categories such as industrial output, foreign debt and city populations; other rankings include brain drain (highest: Guyana; lowest: US), innovation index (highest: US) and cinema attendances (1.6 billion visits per year in India versus 16 million in Sweden). This is not the only book of its kind, but given its convenient, travel-friendly size and the fact that all the information is backed up by the reliable Economist Group, you would be hard-pressed not to find a use for it. RL

Stuffed and Starved
Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System
Raj Patel
Portobello Books, €24, ISBN 9781846270109

The fact that the impoverished workers of the global South strive to feed wealthy Western countries’ appetite for outof-season fruit and vegetables is an increasingly touchy subject, and it is equally unsettling to note that 800 million people are undernourished while 1.1 billion are obese. Patel, who has worked with the World Trade Organisation, UN and World Bank, has written a sensitive, intellectually discriminating and well-supported analysis of the global food market. Distressing but essential reading. RL

Art

London, England
Millais
Tate Britain, until 13 January, 2008
www.tate.org

The first major solo exhibition of Millais since 1967, this well-crafted show examines the pre-Raphaelite artist’s career from his magnificent, jewel-like paintings of exotic women to his relatively unknown late landscape art. Don’t miss.

Berlin, Germany
Jeff Wall: Exposure
Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, until 20 January, 2008
www.deutsche-guggenheim-berlin.de

New large-scale black and white photographs by eminent Canadian photographer Jeff Wall explore the desolation of place and human circumstance in contemporary society through the legacies of documentary photography and neo-realist film.

Vienna, Austria
Gallery IX: Peter Paul Rubens
Liechtenstein Museum Permanent Collection
www.liechtensteinmuseum.at

Few know that the Liechtenstein Museum, actually based in Vienna, operates the largest acquisition budget of any museum in Europe thanks to the royal collections. Gallery IX presents an exceptional collection of 33 Rubens paintings as well as works by contemporaries Maerten de Vos and Anthony van Dyck.

Paris, France
The Song of the World: The Art of Safavid Iran, 1501–1736
Louvre, until 7 January, 2007
www.louvre.fr

This exhibition outlines the evolution of art in Iran under the Safavid Dynasty (1501–1736), focussing on how the visual arts are inextricably linked to the written word in Iranian culture. The ultimate theme remains the greatness of the world as a divine creation.

Edinburgh, Scotland
Joan Eardley
National Gallery, until 13 January, 2008
www.nationalgalleries.org

The ?rst major retrospective of postwar abstract artist Joan Eardley, this exhibition covers every aspect of her career, from pastel sketches to huge oil paintings and from student work to the rugged, majestic seascapes of her later years.