'Morgan's Passing' by Anne Tyler
25 February 2022
Anne Tyler is one of the great contemporary American novelists. I have long admired her understated masterpieces - which never stray far from Baltimore and focus almost exclusively on domestic family life but still manage to say so much about the world. It was fascinating to hear a rare interview with Anne Tyler on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 this week (you can listen at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0014p3b) just after I had finished reading her 1980 novel ‘Morgan’s Passing’. Having recently read her most recent (and possibly final) short novel ‘Redhead by the Side of the Road’ (reviewed here in October 2021) it was interesting to go back to this much earlier work. ‘Morgan’s Passing’ felt like a prototype for the books I think of as quintessential Anne Tyler, such as 'Noah's Compass' (reviewed here in May 2010), 'The Beginner's Goodbye' (reviewed here in March 2013), 'Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant' (reviewed here in July 2014) and 'A Spool of Blue Thread' (reviewed here in March 2015). All the familiar Anne Tyler elements are present but the structure of ‘Morgan’s Passing’ is a little more experimental. Morgan Gower, is a likeable but exasperating eccentric - a familiar Anne Tyler character but it is unusual that he is the main protagonist rather than an amusingly embarrassing peripheral family member. Morgan is a Walter Mitty-like daydreamer, endlessly slipping into fictional personas - entertaining to bystanders but infuriating to his wife. Also unusually, for Anne Tyler, the story spans 12 years, starting in the late 1960s. It’s an enjoyable tale but I found it hard to sympathise with Morgan and wondered whether the book would have worked better with his wife Bonny as the central character.
Labels: Books
‘Laura Knight: A Panoramic View’
25 February 2022
Dame Laura Knight (1877 - 1970) was one of the most popular English artists of the twentieth century. On Saturday I was at Milton Keynes Gallery to see ‘Laura Knight: A Panoramic View’ - an exhibition curated by Anthony Spira and Fay Blanchard bringing together over 160 works from public and private collections to provide a fascinating overview of Knight’s career. A painter in the figurative, realist tradition, Laura Knight embraced English Impressionism. She was the perfect candidate for a biographical exhibition because her work falls neatly into a series of distinct periods, styles, locations and subjects. After her early works, painted while she was living in Staithes, North Yorkshire, she spent the First World War in Cornwall where she produced a range of rural pictures. After moving to London, Knight’s attention turned to ballet, painting some of the most famous dancers of the day from Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Later she went on a tour with the combined Bertram Mills and Great Carmo's Circus in order to paint circus scenes. During the Second World War, Knight was an official war artist, producing portraits and posters in the socialist realist style to bolster female recruitment to the war effort. In 1946 she painted scenes from the Nuremberg war crimes trials, spending three months observing the main trial from inside the courtroom. The MK Gallery exhibition focussed on each of these periods in her life in chronological order. It was a fascinating collection of the work of this prolific and varied artist. You can see a selection of Laura Knight paintings at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-_pqbr6EjM
Labels: Exhibitions, VisualArt
‘Jazz, Jazz, Jazz’ by The Scorpions and Saif Abu Bakr
18 February 2022
I’ve written here before about the flowering of Ethiopian popular music in the 1960s - incorporating Western instruments and influences but retaining the distinctive pentatonic scale and asymmetrical rhythms of the country's traditional music. French record producer Francis Falceto famously rediscovered vintage recordings on reel-to-reel and vinyl and reissued them on CD as the 'Éthiopiques' series (see 'the very best of éthiopiques', reviewed here in November 2007). This week I’ve discovered another strand of brilliant vintage African popular music, from a recommendation in the fascinating Substack newsletter ‘The Signal From David Katznelson’ (subscribe for free at: https://oakiedog.substack.com/). ‘Jazz, Jazz, Jazz’ is an instrumental album by Sudanese band The Scorpions and Saif Abu Bakr. Originally released in 1980, in 2018 it became the ninth instalment of Habibi Funk’s series of Arabic music reissues. The album is a cool collection of jazz, funk, rock and psychedelia with a very laid-back groove. The guitar and saxophone sound reminded me of Senegal’s Orchestra Baobab (reviewed here in June 2017). You can get a flavour of ‘Jazz, Jazz, Jazz’ at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2o6mHk3QJY
Labels: Albums, Music
'The Lincoln Highway' by Amor Towles
11 February 2022
The Lincoln Highway was the first transcontinental road across America, running from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. In Amor Towles’ new novel, ‘The Lincoln Highway’, 18-year-old Emmett Watson, who has just been released from prison in 1954, plans a road trip with his 10-year-old brother Billy to start a new life in California - but things don’t go as planned. Like many epic heroic tales, ‘The Lincoln Highway’ starts its narrative ‘in media res’ - in the middle of the plot, but also in the middle of the Highway in rural Nebraska halfway between New York and San Francisco, because Amor Towles is not just telling us a story but telling us about story-telling. His previous novel ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ (reviewed here in September 2021) was my Pick of the Year: it is a remarkable book - charming, moving, clever and witty. ‘The Lincoln Highway’, which I have just finished reading as an unabridged audio book, narrated by Eduardo Ballerini, Marin Ireland and Dion Graham, is a very different story but has a similar feel. The characters are wise but not always clever, naive but unexpectedly articulate, and sympathetic despite the mistakes they make and the crimes they commit. There is a folksiness to the writing that brings a flavour of Mark Twain to mid-century middle America while also nodding to the novels of John Steinbeck. But there is also an underlying parallel with the Greek heroic epics that reminded me of the Coen Brothers film ‘O Brother Where Art Thou?’ (which is based on ‘The Odyssey’ by Homer). ‘The Lincoln Highway’ alternates the narrative point of view between each of the main characters, often overlapping different views of the same scene. This allows Towles constantly to undercut our expectations and keep us guessing with small plot twists in almost every chapter. And there is a satisfyingly meticulous attention to detail, with every action having some consequence, even if it comes much later in the story. ‘The Lincoln Highway’ is a delicious novel, incredibly likeable, surprising and loveable - I was torn between racing through the book to find out what happened, and not wanting it to end. I absotively loved it.
Labels: Books
‘Leopoldstadt’ by Tom Stoppard
3 February 2022
On Saturday we were at the Curzon Cinema at Milton Keynes Gallery to watch the National Theatre Live recording of Tom Stoppard’s new play ‘Leopoldstadt’, directed by Patrick Marber at Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End. The play tells the story of an extended middle-class Jewish family living in Vienna from 1899 to 1955. Almost all the scenes take place in the family’s apartment, but are separated by gaps of many years. It was quite a challenge merely to keep track of the characters in the various strands of the family, as young children from one scene appear as adults in the next. But this creates a fascinating, and believable, family saga, against the ominous backdrop of the coming Holocaust. As always, Stoppard’s script is witty and intellectual - at times here becoming a little too much like a George Bernard Shaw play in which the rigorous debate of ideas over the dinner table feels a bit unrealistic. Nevertheless it’s a gripping and achingly sad journey, told very straight-forwardly. ‘Leopoldstadt’ reminded me of ‘The Hare With Amber Eyes’ (reviewed here in September 2011) in which Edmund de Waal recounts the experiences of the Viennese branch of his own Jewish family through the same period of history. I was also reminded of Ronald Harwood’s play ‘Mahler's Conversion’ which deals with the composer Gustav Mahler rejecting his Jewish background in 1897 to convert to Catholicism in order to be granted the prestigious position of Director of the Vienna Court Opera. The story of the rise and fall of a Jewish family business also made me think of that incredible staging of the tale of Lehman Brothers Bank - 'The Lehman Trilogy' by Stefano Massini, adapted by Ben Power (reviewed here in August 2019). ‘Leopoldstadt’ is excellently acted by a cast of about 30. It is a tragic story, beautifully presented.
Labels: Drama, Film, Theatre
